Quick Tip: How to Defragment Your Hard Drive

Defragmenting is one of the maintenance tasks you have most certainly heard about when it comes to using Windows, but not everyone knows how it works or how to defragment your hard drive.

What is Defragmenting?

Disk Defragmenter rearranges fragmented data so your disks and drives can work more efficiently. When you don’t fragment your hard disk, it has to work extra hard and this can ultimately slow down your computer. Of course this can be one factor.

We looked at other options for optimizing the performance of your PC by doing regular task such as removing programs you no longer use, using Ready Boost, moving frequently used files to an external storage device.

How to Defragment Your Hard Drive:

To start defragmenting, click Start, type: Defrag

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Then hit Enter on your keyboard

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This will open the Disk Defragmenter utility:

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Before we begin, we should first find out if the disk does need defragmenting. To do so, click the Analyze disk button.

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Analyzing the disk to see if it needs defragging.

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The results show that only 6% percent of my hard disk is fragmented, so that’s not such bad deal for me, but I will go ahead and defrag it anyway. If yours is considerably more than this, it is definitely recommended you defragment the disk.

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Defragment in progress.

This is a very boring task, I suggest you find something else to do or defrag at a time that you find most convenient. Disk Defragmenter might take anywhere from several minutes to a few hours to finish, depending on the size and degree of fragmentation of your hard disk.

Although you can do other tasks while Defragmenter operates in the background, I recommend you don’t use the computer during this time. Also, you can setup a schedule you find appropriate to run the Defragmenter.

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