It’s time for your friendly reminder. If you haven’t done it lately, you need to defragment your hard drive. This should be done at least monthly. To learn what it’s all about, scroll down for the gory details. To just defrag and move on, the instructions are here if you need them.

Defragmenting hard drive (C:)

1. Click on Start – Programs – Accessories – System Tools – Disk Defragmenter
2. Click the Defragment button.
3. If you have less than 15% of your hard drive free, it will ask if you’re sure you want to defrag now anyway. Click Yes.
4. (If it’s much less than 15%, you may want to delete some unneeded larger files or file folders (and empty the Trash) or else run the Defrag program a second time.)

OR

1. Open My Computer
2. Right click on C:
3. Select “properties”
4. Click on tab labeled “Tools”
5. Under “Defragmentation” select
   “Defragment Now”
6. When the service opens first
   select “Analyze”. After this runs it will tell you whether or not the
   drive needs to be defragmented. If it does simply select the defragment
   option.

What is file fragmentation

Sometimes when you install a program or create a data file, the file ends
up chopped up into chunks and stored in multiple locations on the disk. This
is called fragmentation.

What makes this happen?

When you first install your operating system and programs on your hard
disk, they are written to the disk, for the most part, in one contiguous block
without any gaps. The exceptions are certain system files that must be stored
in specific locations. Over time, as you create and then delete documents or
uninstall programs, once-filled locations are left empty and you end up with
files dotted all over the disk.

Now, when Windows is writing a file to the disk, it looks for a suitable
piece of free space in which to store it. What happens, then, when you copy a 40M
database or audio file to the disk and the biggest slice of free space is only
30M? Or say you modify an existing file, appending a whole bunch of data so
the file now takes up more space on the disk. To accommodate the files,
Windows writes the first part of the file in one section of the disk and then
scouts around for other places to store the rest of the file. The end result
is that a single file may be stored in several chunks scattered about the
disk.

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