How to Defragment Your Hard Drive

One of the most difficult task is keep up the performance of computer as time passes and the Operating System becomes old. Within a month, you would have added new files, moved numerous files and would have attempted many Hard Disk Input Output operations. This process though it looks simple, but makes many fragments of the files and they are distributed all over the hard disk in a random fashion. If you want to access them, then the Hard Disk has to toggle itself to those locations every now and then making system performance very low. These pieces are also responsible for corrupt data and hard disk crashes. So it is advisable to defragment the hard disk once every month at least, if not more.

Microsoft Windows XP provides an option for it with a utility called Disk Deframenter. This utility will help you associate the pieces of the files that are scattered over and will make them available to you in one place which will boost up your Computer's Performance.

Though this is a process that should be attempted frequently, but let me warn you that this process is extremely time consuming and will be drastically slow. Above that, it is not advisable to use your computer while the Hard Disk is being defragmentaed as it may harm your data or render your hard disk useless.

To start this process, just navigate to:

Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter

This will open up a window. On the top is the listing of the Logical Drives that you have created. Just select the Partition that you want to defragment. Another piece of advice is to backup your data as it will save you a lot of headache if something goes wrong.

Now we can start the process. Just click on the drive which you want to defragment and right click on it. Just select the Analyse Option in it. Once the disk is analysed, it will show you a graph below. It that graph contain a lot of RED Colour, then you have to defragment it. Right Click on the drive again and select Defragment. This will analyse the disk again and start the disk defragmentation process.

Slowly, all the RED color will be transformed into Blue Colour which means contiguous files. Once that has been done, repeat this process for other Partitions and get the Hard Disk defragmented. Now just restart your computer. And you would feel the increase in the speed and performance of your system.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_Defragmenter_(Windows)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314848