A friend sent me an e-mail, in it he asked:
How does one defrag their computer?
My reply back:
Well…
You remove the hard drive from the system and using an electron microscope you need to examine each individual hard drive cluster (there are 180,000 of them) and using a special de-fragment tool (looks like a kitchen knife but it’s not; it’s special) you have to re-organize the clusters in the proper order; which in and of itself is pretty easy. Just don’t put them in the wrong order otherwise you could cause the drive to go nuclear. Really pretty easy stuff. I do it all the time.
Or…
You could:
Start –> All Programs –> Accessories –> System Tools –> Disk Defragmenter –> window pops up make sure the C: drive is selected and click on Defragment.
Depending on how fragmented the drive is it could take a bit.And, sorry I can’t resist:
Q: How does one defrag their computer?
A: You don’t, you defrag your hard drive.Unless you mean “frag” in the sense of the video game or military use of the word, which is to “kill.” If that’s the case then when you ask “how does one defrag their computer?” you mean “how does one un-kill their computer?”
That, depends on how you killed it.
Note that the bold text above is actually the way you defrag your hard drive in Windows XP, the rest of that stuff was me messing with my friend.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
A lot of users dont know what fragmentation is. Its a much debated topic, whether fragmentation affects system performance or not and how often one has to attend to this maintenance task. I do it very regularly to avoid stressing out my drive and also to improve the response of the system. Its essential to keep the drive healthy and prevent this malady from eating into the optimum performance that the HDD can lend to the PC.
optimist -
Yes, defragging you hard drive every now and then is a good idea… With that said, in Windows XP if your drive(s) are formated as NTFS then fragmentation isn’t as big of an issue as is was (or is for some) with Windows 98 and FAT32 drives. For the average user (from my experience anyway) fragmentation under Windows XP is a practically a nonissue - for the average user. If you are capturing video, moving files around a lot then you’re going to cause a greater amount of fragmentation and will need to defrag more offten. Honestly, the only time I can remember seeing a performance increase from a defrag was on Windows 95/98.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t defrag - and actually there is an easy way to tell if your drives need a defrag (Windows XP) on the defragment tool there is an ‘Analyze’ button, click that and Windows will tell you if your drive needs to be defraged. If I remember correctly Windows Disk Defragmenter will recommend a defrag when it sees around 10% fragmentation on the drive. If it tells you that it does not need to be defraged then it’s because it would take more time to defrag then the performance gain is worth (you would not see any). I have/use systems that are used for video editing so there are lots of files (large and small) being moved around a lot, for those systems defragging the drives is a concern, where with my Grandma’s system which she uses to check e-mail it’s not.
My advice - every now and again open the Disk Defragmenter and click ‘Analyze’, if it says it needs a defrag then do it, if not then close it and go on with your life. If you are a “power user” and you create, delete and/or move files around a lot then it’s something you should check more often.
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