How to Defrag Your Hard Drive

If you have noticed that your computer is beginning to get a little sluggish, it's a great time to consider a defrag! What is a defrag? Well, let me explain.

Whenever you install a new program to your computers hard drive, it basically installs in the first available spot it sees. Eventually, you will notice a significant slow down when booting, opening programs, or veiwing drives. This is because all your information is all over the place. A defrag, will look through your file system, and index everything in order, thus speeding up your hard drive! Sound good? Great, let's get started!

Just so you know, while you are defragging your hard drive, your computer will be pretty much unusable. The time it takes to complete, is based on how fragged your hard drive is. It could take as little as 15 minutes, or as long as 8 hours. Its always best to do this at night, right before bed. Be prepared!

First thing we want to do, is to close all open programs. Nothing should be running while the defrag is in progress. Your computer is really gonna need all the resources it can get! Also, be sure to disable your screen saver, as this will slow down the process, or possibly cause the process to crash.

Now, open up the "Disk Defrag" Utility. It can be found my clicking, Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter.

Once this program has loaded, choose which disk drive you wish to defrag, (this is usually the C:, but it may differ in your case) and click "Analyze".

After the analysis is done, the defragment button should appear. Click the "Defragment" button.

Finally, after the defragment is finished, you will see the message "Defragment Complete".

Now, you could stop there, your operating system has put everything back in a better order, or we could run it again. Running a second time will be quicker, and also do more in depth indexing. The choice is yours, but as I always say, "The more , the merrier". I have ran the defrag program as many as four times in a row.

After a hard reboot, you should immediately notice a faster boot time, quicker progam access, and drive views. Defragging your hard drive can actually let web pages load faster, and downloads to become quicker, because all of these things access your hard drive.

Defragging is a must, if you want to keep that hard drive running smoothly for years to come. If you use your computer on a dialy basis, I personally recommend running the defrag program once a month. The more you use it, the quicker the whole process becomes!