by Anthony Ogg

Created on: July 12, 2009   Last Updated: July 13, 2009

Imagine that you have a deck of playing cards. Now imagine someone takes them and throws them in a single pile all over your living room floor. Now you have to pick them up and organise them into suits. It can be done fairly easily when they're all in one single pile. Now use this same scenario, except this time someone throws a small pile of them in your living room and another pile in your bathroom, bedroom, and some in your car. It would take you much longer to gather up all of the cards when they are strewn all over your house and inside your car than it did in one small pile. When your hard-drive is fragmented, it has to search all over its surface for small fragments of a single file.

De-fragmenting your hard drive takes all of those fragments of files and puts them all together in the correct order. This makes you hard drive not have to search over millions of file fragments to gather them together to open the file you command it to open, thus making the program that you open a lot faster.

After a while, files become fragmented, due to deleting old or unused files, and installing new files. For example, When you downloaded that song yesterday and transferred it to your iPod, the fragments were close together. But when you moved it to another folder and downloaded another song, fragments began to get spread out in the hard drive.

It takes a good while of moving, deleting and downloading for a disk to become fragmented. After a while the hard drive gets so fragmented that it actually slows down the system. When this occurs a de-fragmentation is required.

You should not wait until you notice differences in system performance to de-fragment the hard drive. The hard drive should be de-fragmented once every 2 or 3 months for best results in performance. If the hard drive has never or rarely been de-fragmented and the system has been used for a long time, it can take a painfully long time to de-fragment the drives. It has taken two or three days to de-fragment real old hard drives that have not been de-fragged before.

If you have never de-fragged your hard drive before start the de-fragmentation before you go t work or bed as it will probably take several hours to complete.

All windows based operating systems have a de-fragmentation program. To run it simply click start, (all)programs, accessories, system tools, disk de-fragmentor. Then select the drive(s) you wish to de-fragment and click start.

De-fragmentation is a fairly simple process that does wonders for increasing speed and performance.

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