The Microsoft® Windows operating system provides many useful functions and tools for keeping your system properly maintained. These utilities are easy to use and most PC users can run these programs without any assistance. An important procedure to keep your computer running efficiently is called disk defragmentation. It sorts and organizes your hard drive sectors which will help to increase the speed and accuracy of reading data from your disk.
Each time you perform common operations with your files and folders, such as copy, delete, move, etc., you fill sectors of your hard drive with bits of data. By periodically defragmenting your hard drive, you will be able to improve your system’s overall performance and it will run more efficiently. To perform a hard disk defragmentation, follow the instructions below.
Instructions:
- Open the Start menu and go to “All Programs > Accessories > System tools > Disk Defragmenter”.
- In the “Current status” field, choose the disk you would like to defragment.
- Click on the “Analyze” button.
- When the analysis is complete, the result window will pop up.
- Click on the “Defragment” button.
Tips and tricks:
- As an extra safety measure, use a third-party utility, such as Online Vault (refer to the article that focuses on the storing files online) to first back up your data before running the defragmentation.
- Try to run the disk defragmentation at a time when you are not working with files from disk, it may slow down the data reading speed.
- Run the defragmentation only when the analyzer evaluates it as needed. Otherwise it may be needless.
Warnings:
- Only NTFS, FAT and FAT32 file systems can be defragmented.
- Network locations cannot be defragmented.
