All hard disks benefit from the process of ‘defragmentation’ whereby individual files are reorganised to occupy a contiguous area of the disk rather than being stored as numerous linked fragments.
Fragmentation occurs because it’s practical to write new data in the first convenient space on the disk rather than copying the whole file to a space big enough to accommodate it.
While this method makes efficient use of available disk space and is the quickest way to add file updates, the speed of access becomes slower over time as the files become more fragmented and greater effort is required to assemble the bits.
In practical terms, most Windows users will benefit from a hard-disk defragmentation every few months though this obviously depends on individual usage.
One useful feature of Windows Vista is that it is set up to carry out this process automatically though the ‘default’ setting for this seems to be at 1:00 am on a Wednesday morning when the equally-useful power-saving features of Vista are quite likely to have put the PC into ‘sleep’ mode.
Sadly, if the scheduled time is missed, there is no automated facility to catch-up.
The practical answer here is to change the scheduled defragmentation to a time when the PC is likely to be on―regular (daily or weekly) defragmentation will hardly be noticed by the user so it really doesn’t matter if some of the jobs are missed.
If the PC has become noticeably slow due to fragmentation, the process could easily take an hour or so―older and slower PCs or those with little spare disk capacity could take several hours to defragment.
Defragmenting (Windows Vista)
- Click Start > Computer
- Right-click on the C: drive (or any other disk) and click ‘Properties’
- Select the ‘Tools’ tab
- Click ‘Defragment Now’
- Click the ‘Modify Schedule’ or ‘Defragment Now’button, as required―by default, all recognised disks are selected but this can be changed
The procedure for Windows XP is similar but no scheduling is available.
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