This is something that can really affect your computer if you do tasks that involve large files, or move files around a lot. Examples of tasks such as this can be browsing the internet, playing games, and photo editing. These tasks can cause fragmentation on your hard drive. To understand what this means, you need to understand how a computer writes data to the hard drive. A computer writes files onto the hard drive in things called sectors. The computer breaks up your files into parts and writes each part into each sector, starting from sector 1, 2, 3, and continuing on. If you delete a file, the sectors that the file occupied are now empty, so the computer writes to those sectors first. If the new file is too big for those sectors to hold, it fills those sectors then skips all filled sectors until it gets to an empty sector, fills that one, then goes onto all available sectors until the file is finished writing. How this slows your computer is that it has to find all of those sectors that the file uses, and it takes time to move over the filled sectors.

 

Phew, that was a mouth full! No need to worry, though, a hard drive has so many sectors that you won't notice much of a difference in speed unless you are always moving large files. We will be using the built-in Windows Disk Defragmenter to help with this problem. Just follow the steps below to learn how to combat this!

 

1) Click on the "Start" button located in the lower-left hand corner of your screen. Then click on "All Programs" => "Accessories" => "System Tools" and finally click "Disk Defragmenter."

 

2) A screen that looks similar to this should appear:

 

 

Once this screen loads up, check to see how many partitions you have. According to this picture, I have one. Most computers will have one however newer computers will have two. Look near the top of the window. Do you see "Volume?" The list under that shows your partitions.

 

3) To defragment the partitions, click on the partition you want to defragment and click the "Defragment" button. This can be a quite long process, so I would recommend setting it to start and leaving your computer on over night, or simply set it to run and go make dinner! I would recommend doing this bit of optimization monthly.