How to Analyze and Defragment Your Hard Disk

Over time, files and applications are scattered in various places on your hard disk. It’s fragmented which makes your hard disk do extra work, slowing down your computer. So, we need Disk Defragmenter to rearrange fragmented data, which brings those scattered pieces together to help your disks and drives work more efficiently. Disk Defragmenter runs on a schedule, but you can analyze and defragment your disks and drives manually.

Analyzing and defragmenting hard disks will help to preserve the performance and general operation of your computer.

Defragmenting a disk volume can take a long time which depends on the size of the volume, the number of files, the percentage of fragmentation, and the availability of system resources. So, you should firstly analyze volumes before defragmenting them, then decide whether to take the time to run the defragmentation process. Analyzing and defragmenting a hard disk is an easy task. The following instructions will show you how to analyze and defragment hard disk in Windows XP.

Analyze fragmented files and folders on a hard disk.

1. Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, and then click Disk Defragmenter.
2. Click the volume that you want to analyze.
3. Click Analyze to begin the analysis.
4. Review the results of the analysis after it is complete by clicking View Report. If the analysis tool recommends that the volume be defragmented, follow the next steps.

Defragment a hard disk.

1. Click Defragment to begin the operation.
2. Review the progress of the operation in the Defragmentation Display window. Fragmented files on the disk appear in red, contiguous files are blue, and system files are green. Our goal is to eliminate most of the red in the window.

You can also access Disk Defragmenter as below.

1. Click on “My Computer” to view all drives
2. Right-Click Local Disk you want to defragment and choose “Properties”
3. At Choose “Tools”tab, choose to click the “Defragment Now” button. Disk Defragmenter will show up.

After defragmenting your hard disks, you will feel your computer response faster and smoother when you launch an application or open a file or surf the Internet because programs and files will tend to store in one general area and many Internet files are removed. Windows built-in defragmentation program will keep your hard disk in top shape. I suggest you give your hard disk a regular defragmentation clean every 2-4 weeks.

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