Maintenance Tutorial #1
One of the biggest questions I often hear is, "How often should I defrag the files on my computer?"
If you are like a lot of the computer users I encounter, I would say, "every once in a blue moon." The reason, most home computer users just surf the Internet and check e-mails and maybe play a game or two. But, if you were performing functions like editing a lot of photos, editing videos or music on a daily basis then, you would probably want to perform a hard disk defragmentation more often.
Now you are probably asking yourself, "What is hard disk defragmentation?" Here's the long and short of it.
When you save a file for the first time, the file is saved at the next available spot on the hard drive. When you make changes to a file and save it again, the new "updated" file, may be saved at a different spot on the hard drive. After a period of time of opening, changing and re-saving this file, pieces or, "fragments", of this file, may be scattered over a large area of your hard drive. This can make opening your files, take longer.
Defragmenting a hard drive, takes all of the pieces of a file puts them together. This will in turn, decrease the amount of time it takes to open that file. It's like a jig saw puzzle. You have many pieces of the overall puzzle but, by putting all of the pieces together, you have a completed puzzle. More frequent defragmentation or, "defragging", would be best suited for those in an office environemnt.
Now that we have talked about what "defragging" is, let's see how you actually "defrag" a computer.
- For Windows XP users, left click on the "START" button.
- Left click on "All Programs" and then move your mouse pointer to the "Accessories", folder.
- The look for the, "System Tools" in the listing.
- Left click on, "Disk Defragmentor".
- In the next window, left click on the "C:\" listing to highlight in blue.
- Left click on the "defragment" button.
- Kick back and relax while your computer does its thing.
- Click ok once the process is completed.