Free Hard Drive Help: Defragment Your Hard Drive

Free guide to defragmenting your hard drive.

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How To Degragment Your Hard Drive

A Do-It-Yourself guide
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Why do I need to defragment my hard drive?

Imagine you purchased a new bookcase, and initially organized your books by category on the top shelf. Over the years, you continue to add books and begin placing books on lower shelves, or returning them to new locations in the bookcase. Inevitably, your initial organization efforts will break down over time and it takes longer and longer to retrieve specific books. This is analogous to your computer hard drive.

The clusters of data needed to run a program grow further apart over time, decreasing the performance of the computer. In fact, it happens every time you install a new program, downloads files, or delete files and programs. This process of adding and deleting files from sectors on your hard drive is called fragmenting.

                                          So what can I do about it?

Defragmenting the hard drive can increase the overall speed of your computer. Much like your bookcase, a good reorganization will speed up your retrieval time. The process will reorganize the images on your hard drive, and essentially place like files back in order. It sounds complicated, but Windows makes it easy.

                                           How long does it take?

If your computer hasn’t been defragmented in a while, this process may take some time. Our suggestion is to run the Disk Defragmenter program at the end of your day, allowing the computer to reorganize the hard drive over a few hours. This process can take several hours depending on the size of your hard drive, and the amount of data stored on it. The next day you should notice decreased loading times, and overall a much faster computer.

It is also recommended that you close all other programs before beginning, otherwise those programs cannot be defragmented. Below is a do it yourself guide to defragment your hard drive. There are also some terrific services available to you to optimize your hard drive and further speed up the search times (listed below).

Need Help Defragmenting your hard drive? Try these tools.

Let's Get Started
Do it yourself guide to deframenting your hard drive (Windows XP)
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1. To begin, open My Computer, right-click on the C: drive. Select Properties, click on the Tools tab. Then select Defragment Now button.

2. After the Disk Defragmenter application launches, identify your C: drive, and click the Analyze button. Windows will begin analyzing your hard drive to determine if defragmenting is recommended.

3. An image of your hard drive will appear in graphical format. This allows you to see where files and applications are currently stored on your hard drive. Windows will suggest further action.

Please Note: The time it takes to run the defragmenting process is dependent upon the size of your hard drive and amount of fragmentation.

4. While the program is running you will see a graphical representation of the blocks of files on your hard drive being moved and the fragmented segments joined together. Usually the less gaps of free space between the contiguous segments the better, but as long as the fragmented files are put together into contiguous segments, it will help your computer's performance.

5. Once the process is complete, the graphic should display most of the contiguous files on the left and the majority of the free space on the right. Close the Disk Defragmenter window and resume using your computer. Disk Defragment complete!

Please Note - If your computer is still running slow, try our free computer tune-up.