Pc Essentials - Hard Disk Defragmentation
I guess it inevitable that if you own a computer that eventually it will slow down to a halt for no apparent reason. And if you ask your Pc literate buddies or your repair guy they will probably tell you it is because of a slow hard drive.
Let me see if anything I say next rings a bell with you. Is your computer so slow that you often compare it to an old lady or man on a Sunday morning drive in a Gremlin? Are you tired of opening up Internet Explorer and expecting one window but getting ten instead? Or you need to write a work document and you open up Microsoft Word and normally it should just pop right up because it is just writing text but takes twenty minutes if so read on.
When you install a program it will put it in whatever free space is available and these bits of data wind up being diced up and placed in several locations on the hard drive. Then you wind up deleting programs and these little spaces are now empty. You are unknowingly causing fragmentation. Imagine taking a clay pot and shattering it on the floor. Look at all those little pieces – you just fragmented a clay pot.
That’s almost how your hard disc looks. Over time it gets worse and worse. Programs that worked fast now work slower. Programs that worked slow now work slower or just stop completely and sit there for hours trying to find some piece of the puzzle.
Programs will always look for a chunk of space where it will fit but if your program is 10 megabytes and all it can find is a 5 megabyte chunk it will take it then it will look for another suitable chunk. It will continue like that until the entire file is on the computer.
You can perform Pc repairs until you are blue in the face, but unless you defragment your hard drive your computer or laptop will always be slow.
Hard disk Defragmentation is the process of reorganization. It is the Chapter 13 of computer utilities. The program will look at your hard drive and analyze the data – looking at the ends of codes to find the pairs and then create a plan of attack.
The utility will then run and snatch up these loose ends and do all sorts of computer mumbo jumbo and put the ends back together so that your 10 megabyte file is now as one. Your computer will run more smoothly than it has been. Run the tool once a month to ensure it stays that way. And that, my friends, is hard disk Defragmentation.
A great blog with more useful information about Computer repair can be found here.
