Using Windows^® Free Disk Defragmenter to Optimize Your Computers Performance

Contributed by Jay Schroyer

Whenever you begin a project, it helps to have all the tools you need close at hand. Who wants to keep running out to the garage to grab a hammer or down to the basement to get a wrench or across town to the hardware store to buy more screws? With that much running around, it could take you all day to complete your project. This same process can be applied to the way your computer saves information to the hard drive and the closer it has your information, the quicker it can provide it for you.

How the Hard Drive Works
Before we go into the actual process of defragmenting your hard drive, it’s important to learn some computer basics about how this storage drive works. When data is saved to your computers hard drive, it is a mechanical process. Imagine your hard drive is like a record player. If you look closely at a record, you see fine grooves embedded in its surface. Each of these grooves accommodates the needle on the arm of the record player that reproduces the recorded sounds. Your hard drive is set up similarly except its grooves are called sectors which are designated areas for data storage. A magnetic arm reads these sectors whenever a command is given to the computer. By spinning the record around, the hard drive can access the information or sectors that it needs to complete your task.

When you save a document to your drive, it fills a particular sector and the magnetic arm knows to go there to retrieve it at your request. But these sectors only hold so much information. Let’s say you edit your document and it becomes larger than the original sector it was saved in. The computer then saves the additional information to another sector. Now, when you access the document, the magnetic arm must first grab the originally saved file and then spin the disk to find the other sector that contains your updated information. As the file becomes larger, the sectors become more widely dispersed making the magnetic arm work harder and longer. Even as you delete files, the spaces of the sectors are left empty causing even more fragmentation. As your drive becomes more and more fragmented, you’ll start to see a lag in response time from your computer. Programs and documents may take longer to load and performing what used to be the simplest of tasks may take longer than you ever expected.

How Defragmentation Works
Defragmentation is exactly what it sounds like: it defragments your drive. By rearranging all of that scattered information throughout your hard drive, the computer can more efficiently and sequentially organize your data so that it doesn’t have to run all over your hard drive gathering information to complete your requests. The end result should be a hard drive that has everything it needs right at its fingertips.

How to Defragment Your Drive
Running the built-in Windows disk defragmenter is a very simple task. The most complex part of the process is figuring out when to do it. If you’ve never defragmented your hard drive then there is all sorts of data spread everywhere throughout your drive. It will take the computer some time to search around and organize this data into efficient and orderly sectors. If you just defragmented last week, it shouldn’t take much time at all. That being said, a defrag could take anywhere from five minutes to five hours depending upon those factors.

It’s important to make sure that you have all programs closed before you start to run the defrag program. It would defeat the purpose of the process if you were updating and modifying files while the drive is attempting to organize its contents. You can begin the disk defragmenter by clicking on the “Start” button and choosing the “Programs” option from the menu. If you then access “Accessories” and then “System Tools,” you’ll see the disk defragmenter program. Its icon resembles a colorful Rubik’s cube or block of Tetris pieces. When the programs window pops up, you will be given the option to choose which drive you would like to defragment.

Because this program works on all sorts of drives, you can also use it on your portable jump and thumb drives. The drive window will tell you information like how much free space is on your drive and its maximum capacity. You can choose to simply analyze the drive or jump right to defragment.

There is also an option to pause or stop the process and a report is available for your reference. A color coded chart at the bottom will show you what parts of the drive are fragmented, contiguous, unmovable, or free space on the drive you’ve selected. There are also two boxes that display an estimate of how much of the disk space is usable before and after defragmentation.

Once the program is running, Windows will give you an estimate of how long it thinks the process will take. This will help you plan whether you can defrag your drive over lunch or overnight.

There are other options and customization features of the disk defragmenter and you can even set it up as part of the computers scheduled tasks to be performed once a week or month. If you’d like to learn more about defrag or even setting up the scheduled task feature, you should check out some computer software education classes online at www.videoprofessor.com.

Windows is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation, registered in the U.S. and/or other countries.

About the Author:
Jay Schroyer has worked in the client and customer service end of business for over five years in retail, advertising, and printing. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English writing and communication.

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