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Disk Defragmentation

Windows computers, unlike Mac or Linux machines, require heavy maintenance and monitoring in order to stay safe and fast. The Windows operating system also has some idiosyncracies which are not found in its rivals, such as its tendency to get the Hard Drive fragmented quickly.

What this means is that during regular use and especially when installing, downloading and deleting things, information gets scattered all over your hard drive, making it more and more challenging for your computer's processor to do its work. Things move around, the processor has to do extra work to find them!

So doing a de-fragmentation regularly is an excellent idea! I'd suggest doing this at least once a month, and probably more often if you are a heavy user.

This is another process that you can let run while you work on something else on your machine, but it will slow you down considerably, and can be annoying. Best to do it and let it run while you go to lunch. Defragmentation can take up to half an hour or more on a Windows XP machine.

Go to "My Computer" and locate your hard drive, usually called "C:"

Right-click and choose "Properties" from the dialogue box:

Locate the "Tools" tab.

Click it, and you will see the error-checking and defragmentation options. Go ahead and select "Defragment Now..."

The following box appears. In most cases you will only see the C: drive, but if you have more than one hard drive or a recovery drive (like the example below) there will be more than one line. Just highlight the C:

"Analyze" will tell you if you need to run the defragmentation, so you might as well do that first! The analyzing takes only a couple of minutes.

If indeed you are prompted to defragment, click "continue" and the dialogue will look like this:

The bottom tells you how much progress is made. Naturally, once you reach 100% you are done. You do not need to monitor this process and as I said before, it can be time-consuming;
so you might as well take a break!

Note that this is going to be faster if you shut down all unecessary programs you might have running.

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