Defragmenting a hard drive rearranges the files so that each file is stored in a contiguous collection of disk sectors. This makes reading and writing files much faster.

Over time, Microsoft Windows will slowly fragment your files, storing parts of each file in seemingly random physical locations on the hard drive. As this happens, your files will take longer and longer to access. The solution is to defrag your hard drive.

Before you Begin

Before opening up the Disk Defragmenter, close programs that are running such as virus scanners. The fewer programs that are running while the defragmenter works, the more efficient and smoothly it will run. More importantly, the less work the hard drive has to do, the more complete the defragmentation will be. Therefore, shut down these programs to have the maximum results.

Next, do a disk cleanup. This will remove any unnecessary files such as Internet files and caches. These are stored on your computer, but by getting rid of them, the defragmenter won’t try and defrag those files. It’ll save time and therefore, the whole process won’t take nearly as long. To start a disk cleanup, open the Start Menu, click accessories and then scroll until the System Tools button appears.

Running a Defrag

To start defragmenting, simply open up the “My Computer” icon from your desktop or your Start Menu and then right click on the hard drive you would like to defrag (if you only have one hard drive then it is most likely the “C” drive). From that window, go down to the very bottom and select the “Properties” button. When the properties window is displayed, click the “Tools” tab near the top of the window. Here there will be a button labeled “Defragment Now…” which you should now select.

The Disk Defragmenter screen allows you two options to begin with, Analyze and Defragment. Analyze will let you know whether the computer thinks it is time to defrag the hard drive, but if you haven’t done it in a while then it is definitely time to do so.

Once you start the defrag process, you should basically leave the computer alone. This process uses up a lot of system resources and will slow the computer quite a bit. Although the defrag process can be paused or stopped, it is usually good to just leave the computer be for however long it takes (it can take up to a few hours depending on how much information is on the drive).

Defragmenting the hard drive will keep your hard drive running efficiently. This will help to speed up the computer as a whole and this process should be done at least once a month to keep the computer working at maximum efficiency.