Hard disks need lots of free room to shuffle data around quickly

Your computer uses a hard disk to store all it’s data on which most people know.  What a lot of people don’t realize is that a hard disk is also used to temporarily store information on by programs while they sort tasks out.

Imagine a hard disk is like a room and the data you store on it are objects in the room.  Now to move these object around you need a bit of spare space right?  It’s pretty hard to move a big wardrobe when you have no floor space!  Disk drives are the same although it’s all 1′s and 0′s and things are far more complex (they always are with technology it seems!).

You need to keep 15% of your hard drive free or it’ll take a lot of time trying to find spare space to place your files and do big calculations and processes.

To see how much space you have left on your computer’s hard disk click on the start menu and then select “computer” or “my computer”:

Checking to see how much free space is left on a hard disk

If it’s unclear how much hard drive space is left make sure you look at the “C:” drive or whichever drive is biggest on your computer.

You can get an in depth report of your hard drive by right clicking on it and then selecting “properties”:

You can see a pie chart of the free/used volume on the hard drive's properties window

So have you blocked up your computer?  If so you need to delete unused programs, movies or music off your computer to free up some spare space.

You may have some computer games or large programs taking up a lot of space on your laptop, these can be removed in the “add/remove programs” tab in the control panel.  Check out the McAfee removal process to see how to remove programs from your personal computer.

An added bonus of freeing up 15% of data is that you may hear a lot less “grinding” noise from the computer as it swap around data frantically!

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.