Defrag! What does that do?
Perhaps it helps if you first understand what fragmentation is. Whenever you save a file onto your hard drive the operating system looks for the first bit of free space it can find and starts writing the file there. Very often there isn't enough room to fit the file in and so the OS finds another blank area of disk and starts writing the rest of the file.
This can result in a single file being split into lots of little bits that are dotted all over your hard drive. Whenever that file is read the hard drive read head has to move backwards and forwards to all the different locations to piece it back together again. The twin disadvantages of this are that it makes file access slower and causes unnecessary wear on your hard drive. Remember, we are not talking about this happening to a single file, but to thousands of them.
The process of piecing each of these file fragments together, each into a single contiguous area of the hard drive is called defragmenting, and it makes file reading faster and cuts down on hard disk wear and tear. If your system is using the FAT32 system it will need degragging a lot more than the NTFS system.
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Defrag question of the month!
Hello, how do I degrag my system?? thanks.
The defrag software can be accessed from many different locations in windows. The most common way to in the Start menu/Accessories menu, then point to system tools.
Hope this helps
