Defragging for Performance
Here’s another quick tip to help you AND your PC be more productive.
This tip is for Defragmenting your hard drive. Sounds scary I know but it’s not really. There is some debate whether this is still needed or not I believe it is. So first here’s the video on How to do it and if you want more information on what Defragmenting is read on past the video.
First let me explain what causes your files to be fragmented and what that actually is. We all know that are files are written to the hard drive and that our hard drives have so much space. So as files are added to your hard drive they are added to the next available space on the drive, kind of “stacked” if you can think of it that way.
If you think of a file as blocks and say you have a file that is stacked side by side 10 blocks long it fills that much space. The next file gets added filling how ever many blocks of space lets say 15 blocks. So now you have 25 blocks in a row.
So now after awhile you decide to delete the first file you added, the computer leaves that 10 block “gap” open for the next file to use, which is fine but the next file you save is not 10 blocks but 20 blocks. So the computer fills in the first 10 blocks and then puts the remaining 10 blocks in the next spot available.
The computer of course knows where to get all the pieces but as you can imagine the more and more this happens the longer it takes to get all the blocks (files) to open up the document you are wanting.
So you can see with the blocks being separated into sections or “fragments” it slows up the process. So by defragmenting it takes all of the pieces and rebuilds the data so that it’s all restored into one stack per file again. Which of course improves overall performance and makes us all happy again LOL.
If you found this video useful please let me know. It helps to know if I should add more in the future.
Also you might check out this other video on my blog Computer Cleaning Tip
Hi Frank,
Two questions. Why do you use Defraggler rather than the Defrag feature built into Vista?
Do you use this in replacement of Optimizing say through Norton 360 or along with and what is the difference?
Thanks,
Cathy
Hi Cathy and thanks for the question. Actually in my tests I ran the Defrag utility from Vista first and found that it was still fragmented considerably.
The actual test I ran was on a pc I was trying to partition the hard drive to dual boot Windows7 RC and after running the Vista Defrag I still couldn’t partition the drive where I wanted because of existing files. I then ran Defraggler which completed the task I needed and was able to make the space needed to partition successfully.
As for the Norton 360 utility I couldn’t say as I’ve not used it. I will say though that since Defraggler is a free application it makes since to give it a try. Again thanks for posting your comment.
Great post, being a computer geek myself, you definitely want to make sure you take care of your hard drive, it can be gone in the blink or a restart. I use the built in defragger in windows xp, and I also run disk cleanup utility and I run a weekly registry clean too, the registry is one of the quickest ways to clean your computer, and make sure to use a adware/spyware remover like ad-aware or spysweeper.
I’ve been using Diskeeper09 for a while now on Vista and its fantastic. Runs in the background and doesnt feel like its even there. I can do all my stuff and it defrags without a hassle.