scottcarson
02-25-2009, 02:57 AM
Understanding your hard drive's complexities is as simple as eating pie at a family picnic. Think of your hard drive as a pie, the files as the free space on the plate, and your relatives as the programs that use the files. Let's say your siblings and uncle each take a piece and eat it all. Then, your mom comes along and takes 2 small slices for her and your dad but then puts one back. Finally, your little niece takes a piece but can only eat half of it so she puts the other half back. Unfortunately, by the time you get to the plate, there's only some "fragments" of pie left. If only you could meld the scraps together to form one usable piece!
In the world of Windows, when a program needs to use some space on the hard drive, Windows allocates as much as it needs. When the program is done, Windows puts it back. The problem is, it's not very organized. After some time, Windows has placed file fragments all over the drive and the amount of free hard drive space becomes very small. So, we need to tell Windows to move all the files to the beginning of the drive so that there's lots of free space on the end. This process is called defragmentation.
It's usually a good idea to perform defragmentation once a month, unless you move around a lot of files in which you should do it more often.
Before we can perform defragmentation, we need to make sure that the data being moved doesn't have any errors in it or we've been spreading around corruption.
The ultimate solution is 2 steps: Scandisk and Defragmentation
STEP 1: SCANDISK
Make sure there are no programs running
Double click "Computer" on the desktop, then right cick on the hard drive icon and click "Properties"
Click on the "Tools" tab, then in the Error-checking section click "Check Now..."
Make sure to place a checkmark next to both options (automatically fix errors and scan for bad sectors), then click "Start"
If asked to schedule the scan for next reboot, click "OK"
Close the Properties window and reboot your computer
STEP 2: DEFRAGMENT
Make sure there are no programs running
Double click "Computer" on the desktop, then right cick on the hard drive icon and click "Properties"
Click on the "Tools" tab, then in the Defragmentation section click "Defragment Now..."
In the window that appears, click on the hard drive that appears under the "volume" column. Then, click the "Defragment" button
When defragmentation is complete, you will receive a pop-up window to notify you. You can click "OK" and close the window(s).
* Note: If you have multiple hard drives, you'll need to repeat each step for each drive.
In the world of Windows, when a program needs to use some space on the hard drive, Windows allocates as much as it needs. When the program is done, Windows puts it back. The problem is, it's not very organized. After some time, Windows has placed file fragments all over the drive and the amount of free hard drive space becomes very small. So, we need to tell Windows to move all the files to the beginning of the drive so that there's lots of free space on the end. This process is called defragmentation.
It's usually a good idea to perform defragmentation once a month, unless you move around a lot of files in which you should do it more often.
Before we can perform defragmentation, we need to make sure that the data being moved doesn't have any errors in it or we've been spreading around corruption.
The ultimate solution is 2 steps: Scandisk and Defragmentation
STEP 1: SCANDISK
Make sure there are no programs running
Double click "Computer" on the desktop, then right cick on the hard drive icon and click "Properties"
Click on the "Tools" tab, then in the Error-checking section click "Check Now..."
Make sure to place a checkmark next to both options (automatically fix errors and scan for bad sectors), then click "Start"
If asked to schedule the scan for next reboot, click "OK"
Close the Properties window and reboot your computer
STEP 2: DEFRAGMENT
Make sure there are no programs running
Double click "Computer" on the desktop, then right cick on the hard drive icon and click "Properties"
Click on the "Tools" tab, then in the Defragmentation section click "Defragment Now..."
In the window that appears, click on the hard drive that appears under the "volume" column. Then, click the "Defragment" button
When defragmentation is complete, you will receive a pop-up window to notify you. You can click "OK" and close the window(s).
* Note: If you have multiple hard drives, you'll need to repeat each step for each drive.