Slow Computer? Solution: Defragment Hard Drive

An easy way to speed up your computer is to defragment hard drive. In one sense, hard drives are very efficient. But in another sense, they are very inefficient.

Here's how a hard drive stores data.

How Hard Drives Work

In short, the only thing organized about a hard drive is its "table of contents" which points to all the areas on a hard drive where a collection of data resides. Otherwise, a hard drive can become very fragmented.

When a hard drive becomes fragmented over time, the seek time (the time it takes a hard drive to fetch all the relevant data) increases dramatically.

Defragging a hard drive moves all related data together, making the hard drive heads move to only one place versus many, thus reducing seek time and speeding up your computer.

Simple Tip: Schedule a hard disk defragment once per week overnight when you're not using your computer. By morning, your hard drive will be defragged.

Windows comes with a defragging utility (%SystemRoot%system32dfrg.msc).

However, there's a better FREE utility for disk defragmentation and it's called JkDefrag.

Simply schedule it to run once a week at off-hours and you're all set. This utility works better than the Windows-supplied mechanism -- it's faster and does not freeze up like Windows' does.

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