What is fragmentation? That is a question that I am asked from time to time especially when a friend is experiencing computer slow down.
Fragmentation is a condition of your hard drive disk in which files are divided into pieces and scattered through out the hard drive. Fragmentation is a natural occurrence that happens when you use your hard drive frequently, creating, modifying or deleting files.
What this means in laymen’s terms is this: Say you have a digital movie of a birthday party, a 500 MB file. You also have 2 GB of free hard drive space. But there is no longer a continuous space of 500 MB available. Your operating system will have to split that file into pieces and save it where there is room. You could also think of this as if your file were a bag of groceries. If you don’t have room in one cabinet for all of the cans, you split them into two or three cabinets.
Your computer will do this without any input from you and it will be completely invisible to you. After a certain point this will slow down your computer as it must search through different portions of your hard drive to retrieve that one birthday movie file.
There is a simple way to remedy this situation and speed up your computer if it is experience these fragmentations slow down. It’s called Disk Defragmentation and it is a tool available with any Windows Operating System.
To access this tool:
1. Double click on your “My Computer”
2. Go to the drive you would like to defrag. For most people this is Local Disk (C)
3. Right click and select “Properties”
4. Click on the “Tools” tab.
5. Click on the “Defragment Now…” Button.
6. Click the “Analyze” Button
After you see the reports Windows will inform you if this disk needs defragged. You will need to have at least 15% free hard drive space for Windows to be able to properly perform this function. If you do not have 15% free space, you will need to clean up your hard drive a bit by deleting unneeded files and/or backing up files to another drive or media (disk, CD, DVD).
Once you are ready to go, you can click the “Defragment” button. You should close down any other open windows or programs running. This will speed up the defragmentation as well as prevent any conflicts from another program writing files while Windows is performing the defrag.
Defragmentation can take a while depending your computer and hard drive size. It is recommended that you do this at a time when you will not require the use of your computer. As it can last a few hours you may choose to let this process be run at night.
Upon completion you should restart your computer. If your files are very defragmented you may need to defrag multiple times. There are also many free or affordable software packages that will handle your defragmentation for you. They have features such as automatic scheduling and a speedier defrag of your hard drive. I will review some of these programs for you in a later article.
The frequency that you should defrag depends mostly upon your computer usage. If you surf the internet and work on a few word files and play a game occasional, once a month should be fine for you. If you download lots of files, play games everyday or do something file intensive like graphic design, you should defrag once a week.