Guide to Defragment a Hard Drive

Defragmenting a hard drive rearranges the files so that each file is stored in a contiguous collection of disk sectors. This makes reading and writing files much faster

Over time, Microsoft Windows will slowly fragment your files, storing parts of each file in seemingly random physical locations on the hard drive. As this happens, your files will take longer and longer to access. The solution is to defrag your hard drive.

Luckily, starting the process of defragmenting the drive is not a hard one.

To start out, simply open up the "My Computer" window and then right click on the hard drive you would like to defrag (if you only have one hard drive then it is most likely the "C" drive). From that window, go down to the very bottom and select the "Properties" button. When the properties window is displayed, click the "Tools" tab near the top of the window. Here there will be a button labeled "Defragment Now..." which you should now select.

The Disk Defragmenter screen allows you two options to begin with, Analyze and Defragment. Analyze will let you know whether the computer thinks it is time to defrag the hard drive, but if you haven't done it in a while then it is definitely time to do so.

Once you start the defrag process, you should basically leave the computer alone. This process uses up a lot of system resources and will slow the computer quite a bit. Although the defrag process can be paused or stopped, it is usually good to just leave the computer be for however long it takes (it can take up to a few hours depending on how much information is on the drive).

Defragmenting the hard drive will keep your hard drive running efficiently. This will help to speed up the computer as a whole and this process should be done at least once a month to keep the computer working at maximum efficiency.