Disk Defragmentation: A Little Housekeeping Now, Less Headaches Later

Your closet is a lot like your hard drive on your computer. When you first put your things in your closet, you neatly arrange your clothes by pants, skirts, tops, shoes, and so on. Then you shop and add more and more clothes and shoes until you accumulate so much junk it takes forever to find what you are looking for. Time to clean it out, ditch what you don’t wear anymore, and reorganize the rest.

Your computer hard disk acts very much the same way. When you first start saving files and programs on your beloved computer, there is plenty of room. Your files are — for the most part — organized and saved in nice, contiguous spaces on the disk with no gaps. After a while, as you create new and delete old documents or uninstall programs, you are left with empty locations – fragments — on the disk. When new files are added, the system will first try to fill in the gaps. If the document is bigger than the gap, the rest of it is saved elsewhere. While it will still save your information and pull it up for you when requested, your computer will be slow and cranky, trying to find all the pieces of your document. What’s a girl to do?

Defragmentation of your disk drive is akin to cleaning out your closet. Defragging assembles the scattered parts of a file and stores them neatly in one complete piece in a cleared space. This is done with each and every file until the entire disk is defragmented. Doing so on a regular basis (monthly is recommended) can significantly improve your PC’s performance, alert you to potential problems, and fix minor glitches before your data can be impacted.

And when it’s done…your disk is ready to handle your files again in a timely, organized fashion. Or, in the case of your closet, more than ready for you to hit the stores once again.

- Angela Skinner Mullen