You are moaning about your slow computer and the nerdy kid eavesdropping on your bitch session pipes up with “Have you defragged it lately?” Before you utter your clever comeback to cover your ignorance on ‘what is defragging’ take a moment and read on. Soon you will speak introductory geek.
So what are fragments and why do you want to defrag to get rid of them? Okay – let me use an analogy. You have a large bookcase with a number of shelves. All your books are in alphabetical order by title from top to bottom. Say that over time you donate a number of your books to a book drive (after all, we would never throw out a perfectly good book). The spaces are now empty. But you have bought more books and rather than move everything you just put the books into the empty spaces. Do this a number of times and your bookcase is no longer organized alphabetically. So when you go to look for a particular book it takes you a long time to find it. This is what happens on your computer. You save files, images, etc. – you delete files, images, etc. As you save new items, your computer fills up the ‘empty’ spaces and so information may end up scattered. When you try to retrieve it, your computer needs to look in a lot of places.
So how to you tidy up this mess? If you are using Windows, you have a defragmentation tool. Click on Programs, then Accessories. Look for the ‘System Tools’ folder and select Disk Defragmenter. Now make sure you run the program when you will not need your computer for awhile – overnight is always good. It can take several hours to finish running the program.
See how easy that was?
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