Hard Drive Maintenance

One time when I was visiting my daughter in Santa Barbara, she asked me to take a look at her computer because it was running slowly. In addition to a ridiculous number of adware and spyware programs cluttering up her system, her 60 gigabyte hard drive was something like 97 percent full. This was on a computer just a few months old. To put it in perspective, my 5-year-old computer at home has a 55 gigabyte hard drive that's only 20 percent full.

When you let your hard drive get that full, the computer has a hard time finding space to save new documents or programs, which makes things slower. It also ends up splitting those documents up into little pieces-putting a bit of it here, a bit there, and the rest back here on your hard drive.

That also slows things down, because when you tell the computer to open the document, it has to find it in all those different places.

So, don't clutter up your hard drive.

On my daughter's machine, the problem was the movies and music files she'd downloaded. I have no evidence that those downloads were illegal or violated anyone's copyright, and anyway, she's out of the country now. Audio and especially video files are huge, and they will fill up your computer faster than a shopaholic can fill up a sale bag at an Old Navy clearance.

This is going to sound like a safe-sex lecture for a moment, so bear with me. When it comes to downloading music and movies without paying for them, the best practice really is abstinence. Make any rationalization you want, but in the end it's still stealing. You are taking something you should pay for and getting it free. It's no better than shoplifting, burglary, or grand theft auto.

If the moral argument doesn't work, consider the legal one: You may get sued, fined, or prosecuted. The more you download, the greater the chances the recording or movie industries will come after you. Courts have held that the software companies that create the peer-to-peer software that makes illegal downloading so easy can be held responsible for the piracy of the people who use the software, so don't be surprised if peer-to-peer file sharing net- works start cracking down or shutting down.

And keep in mind that there are legal and cheap ways to download music. Getting songs for $1 each isn't unreasonable, and new subscription services are even cheaper if you need a lot of music. Just a side note: Software companies are also cracking down on copied and "cracked" versions of their programs. Think twice about buying or borrowing software from the guy in the trench coat down the hall.

If abstinence isn't your thing and you're too much of a tightwad to pay to download stuff legitimately, at least be smart about it. (This is the "If-you're-going-to-do-it-anyway, at-least-do-it-safely" part of the lecture. . . .) Make sure your anti-virus program is updated. Then, after you've downloaded something, get the huge files off your hard drive. Burn movies to DVDs. Media storage is cheap and easy, and there is no reason to fill up your entire hard drive with a bunch of media files that can be better stored elsewhere.

There are two final easy maintenance tasks you need to keep up on. These are every-month-or-two tasks, and they're not too revolting to do.

The first is to clean up your hard drive. Your computer will have a utility program that scans your hard drive looking for unnecessary files to delete or compress. When you start it, it'll take a few minutes to scan your hard drive, then give you several options of things to delete or compress. Those options will usually be in the form of a check box. Check the items you want deleted, uncheck the ones you want to keep. I delete downloaded program files, temporary Internet files, and offline web pages. I don't delete Office setup files, because if I ever need to reload the Office software or add to it, they'll come in handy. I also tell the program to delete files in the recycle bin, temporary files, and web client/publisher temporary files. Compression is okay, but not necessary unless you really need the space.

Once you've cleaned up your drive, it's time to defragment it. The reason you want to defragment your hard drive is because, as you now know, your computer doesn't necessarily keep programs and documents all together on the disk. What defragmenting does is take all those bits of saved files that were broken apart and put them together in order in one place. Then it's easier and faster for your computer to access those files.

So find or use a utility program called a disk defragmenter. It's included in Windows, not with Macs. Do this after a disk cleanup, because the disk cleanup will free up the space for putting the files all together. A screen will come up, giving you two choices-analyze and defragment. Analyze first. You computer will scan its hard drive and show you how much of your hard drive is used and how fragmented files are. If you've never done this before, it can be ugly the first time. When the analysis is done, the computer will tell you one of two things: You should defragment this volume (the hard drive), or it's not necessary to defragment at this time. Follow its recommendation (although defragmenting a drive that doesn't really need it yet doesn't hurt, it's just not necessary).

It takes a while, and if you watch the display window you'll see the computer moving the fragmented bits around until the files are whole and on one part of the hard drive. It's not quite as exciting as watching paint dry, but is better than watching grass grow. You can certainly ignore it and keep working, or use defragmenting time as a perfect excuse to catch up on some quality TV.