How to defrag your Hard Drive

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Every computer has a hard drive that needs to be reorganized and optimized. This is why you need to know how to defrag computer. First of all, you need to know why you would need to defrag a computer. Once you understand why you need to, I will outline the steps to defragging your computer with the standard defrag program in Windows. This article will aim to educate you on how a hard disk get fragmented and then the steps on how to defrag computer.

So why do you need to defrag your hard drive? First of all, a hard drive is composed of several disks or platters. When data gets written to the hard drive, it is written in a continuous fashion. However, when files get deleted and filled with other data, existing data will prevent a continuous stream of data on a disk. Over time, files would get broken up thus resulting in a large amount of fragmented data that is spread across platters on the hard drive. When you defrag computer, you are basically reorganizing the files so that they are continuous stream. This will increase performance by as much as 200% depending on fragmented your PC is. It also alleviates any system errors caused by file fragmentation.

Although there are tools you can buy that do ongoing defragmentation, you can easily do this task manually every so often to keep your hard drive optimized. Here are the steps on how to defrag computer on a Windows 2000/XP/2003 machine:

Step 1: Open "My Computer"
Step 2: Right-click a drive and click properties
Step 3: Click on the "Tools" tab
Step 4: Look for the "Defragmentation" section and click "Defragment Now"
Step 5: This will open the "Disk Defragmenter". Select a drive and click "Defragment"
Step 6: You can see the visual representation of the files in your hard drive. Once they are in continuous colors, you are finished!

I've just told you about the steps on how to defrag computer. Now that you understand how files get fragment, you can see how performance can affected. The steps to defragging your computer should be done at least once a month to keep your hard drive optimized. Defragging your computer should be one of the many tasks to having a healthy computer.