One of the most important ways you can keep your computer running like it should is to make sure you defragment your hard drive regularly. In this article, I shall explain how to defragment a computer running Windows XP.
[Note: For an explanation of what defragmenting is, please read my article entitled "Computers made simple: What does defragment mean and is it important?"]
Goto My Computer and right click on your hard drive (usually C:) Select Properties
When the properties list opens, click on the “tools” tab at the top of the window.
Now click on the button that says “Defragment Now…”
When the disk defragmenter opens, make sure that the right harddrive is selected. (if there is more than one option) Then select “Analyze”
After analyzing the hard drive, disk defragmenter opens a window that tells you if your harddrive needs to be defragmented. If it does, select Defragment.
While it defragments you will notice two colored bars. The top one represents estimated disk usage before defragmentation.
The blue areas represent contiguius files (files that are not fragmented), the red areas represent fragmented files, the green areas represent unmovable files, and the white areas represent free space.
The second bar is labeled “Estimated disk usage after defragmentation” though this is misleading. It has been my experience that this is closer to an estimate of what the drive is currently like.
Now all you have to do is wait for it to finish!
Well, now you know how to defragment your Windows XP computer!
(see also Defragmenting a Hard Drive in Vista )
Filed under: Tech Tutorials
I’ve been running Diskeeper09 in the automode and it defrags really well whenever the system is idle without disturbing other programs. Additional features like system file defrag and low free space defrag are also very useful.
That’s what I like about OSX is that it defrags whenever the system is idle. It’s something I wish Microsoft would incorporate into Windows but it doesn’t appear that they have done it in Windows 7. Most Windows users will have to rely on third-party disk management programs to get the same ability. Linux on the other hand doesn’t even defrag in the sense that Windows does. It’s file system is based on throwing the files all over the harddrive to keep them from being fragmented while Windows machines try to cram all the files as close to each other as possible.
[...] See Also: Defragmenting a Hard Dirve (XP) [...]
[...] also Defragmenting a Hard Drive in XP ) Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Computers made simple: What does defragment mean [...]
Yeah, I agree with your opinion that there are many ways to fix a slow computer and maintain PC performance, a simple disk defragmentation can not be missed when trying to get a faster computer for it helps to easily make the computer run faster by rearranging them stay at the same single place and insist on regularly defragmenting my computer. When searching the Internet, I have found an article taking about this in details as you can get more further information here: http://ezinearticles.com/?Disk-Defragmentation—Make-Computers-Run-Faster-Soon&id=3162755. Believe me, it is really worth reading!