The defragger guide contains, why we need to defragment hard drives and how to do it efficiently.

What does running a hard disk defrag actually do?

When you purchase a new computer or format a hard drive and reinstall an operating system the files are laid out nice and neat, and are stored as complete or contiguous files, when you delete a file or remove an application it leaves a space or in the case of applications lots of spaces.

Even if you never actually delete a file yourself Windows is usually creating or deleting temporary files whenever you’re using your computer.

This then create lots of spaces and the chances of other files being able to fill any of these spaces exactly is very rare, so Windows breaks the file into pieces to fill the space exactly, this then means the file is actually stored in more than one location usually 2 or 3, so when you go to load the file or application Windows then has to go to all these locations to load even a single file, so imagine loading an application that contains lots of files and most of them are fragmented and are stored in multiple locations, this can really slow down your computer by a huge degree.

Windows comes with its own built in defragging software which does an ok job, but as it seems to be the same version which has been in just about every version of Windows has it ever been updated?

As a test I run the Windows defragger and then run a program called disk keeper afterwards, which is a third party defragmenting program; it still advised me that the disk was badly fragmented and need to be defragmented as soon as possible.

So if you have no choice by all means run the Windows defragment tool, but there are other tools around that seem to perform a much better job of defragmenting your hard drive.

The one’s I prefer are Disk keeper which ii think is the best around, but its not free, or Auslogics have a good defragmenting tool which is free for personal use.

Defrag Help – how to defragment your computer

There are 3 ways to invoke the tool

1. Go to My Computer or Computer – Right click on the drive to defragment – Select properties – defragment now.
2. Go to All Programs – Accessories – System Tools – Disk defragmenter.
3. From the start Run menu type – dfrg.msc hit Enter and it will load itself .

Once loaded it’s a good idea to select Analyze to begin with this will tell you if the drive needs to defragmented.

As you can see in the image this hard disk needs to be defragmented as per the report above

As you can see in the image this hard disk needs to be defragmented as per the report below

If you look at the legend on the bottom of the Disk Defragger screen you can see Red means fragmented files, so the hard drive looks very fragmented.

Now click on Defragment to invoke the defragger – depending on the level of fragmentation and the speed of your hard drive it could take anything from 20 mins to several hours to run.

Once it has begun if you need to you can pause it or cancel it if you need to do anything else, and then continue it at a more convenient time.

If you find the Disk defragger does not run consider running CHKDSK over your hard drive first.

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