Hard disks get very messy over time

Your hard disk stores data in a strange way – it picks a random position on the hard disk and then keep looking forwards to a spare spot.  Things on your main hard drive constantly get created and deleted leaving empty gaps in the information.  If data need to be stored in those empty gaps then it has to be chopped up into chunks and spread around the empty spaces.  This causes your storage device to become “fragmented” (i.e all over the place).

So is there a way to sort the data on your computer out more uniformed? Yes there is…and it’ll make everything run faster if you do it!

Windows has a great de-fragmentation tool which will solve this problem but before you use it you must have at least 15% of your hard disk space free first.

To set off the defragmentation tool you need to right click on your main hard disk on the “Computer” or “My Computer” tab on the start menu.  Again you can see an example of how to access your hard drive on the other hard disk post. One you right click on the C: drive you need to click “properties”.  From here you should chose the “tools” tab and you’ll find the defrag settings:

Right click on your bigger hard disk to access the defrag settings in the "tools" tab

Now simply select the main hard drive (usually the C: drive) and tell the computer to defragment the disk.  The process may take a while if you’ve never done it, but be patient and don’t run any programs whilst you de-frag.  Perhaps do this overnight if your hard disk looks like it’s very messed up!

This will speed up your computer especially if you play computer games or edit movies and give your computer a rest in reading physical drives.  If you run Windows Vista then this may be already set to happen every week by default, older versions of windows will find major fragmentation happens about once a month if they use the computer a lot.