John Hookham Help Site

Defragmenting your PC or laptop disk

Your pc or laptop is no different than your car or any other machine. It needs to be maintained to function at its most efficient. And one of the most simple and effective pc maintenance tasks is disk defragmentation. In summary, with a fragmented disk the computer files are spread all across the disk and stored in an inefficient way.

1. A fragmented disk causes the disk to thrash. This creates excessive work to be done by the computer, collecting together all of the relevant pieces of the file that is to be worked on or used. This extra effort will reduce the life of the disk drive. 2. The load time for frequently used programs such as Word and Excel will be reduced saving time on a daily basis. 3. General maintenance tasks such as virus scanning also work more efficiently with a defragmented disk. Instead of instigating separate scans for each file segment one scan will be used for the whole file. 4. PC boot time will be reduced as the start-up files will be loaded in a more efficient manner. 5. The system will also operate with fewer problems, for example difficulties connecting to internal office intranets using roaming profiles can often be solved by defragmenting the disk and cleaning out old and redundant files. 6. Web browsing speeds will be improved if the Internet Cache is defragmented. 7. With a modern pc the disk is invariably the slowest component, processor speeds and memory access times have improved enormously but disk drives are still mechanical devices and as such have physical restraints.

So the cheapest and easiest way to increase your laptop or pc performance is to defragment its slowest component; the disk drive.

Defragmenting the disk is easy. The program can be searched for and run manually or a better alternative is to set-up the ‘disk defragmenter’ program to run at set times using a predefined schedule.