What's a defrag?

If your computer seems to be running a bit slow, one of the easiest things you can do is defragment or "defrag" your hard drive. If this is something you've never done before, you might notice quite a nice performance boost when you're done. It's time consuming, but very simple, and it's something you can just set to run and walk away. Before we get into how to go about this, let's go through what fragmentation is in the first place.

When we think of our hard drives, we tend to think of them like vast, open, linear space. But your computer doesn't see it that way. Puny human brains! Windows sees your hard drive in a series of clusters, all the same size. I like to think of this series of clusters as a big bag of identical Legos. Windows will assign however many of these "Legos" to each file, depending on its size. The picture of you on a fishing trip may get one "Lego" while the video of you falling out of the boat may get 3. Now, your computer does not need these "Legos" to be kept together, it can still read them if they are separated to make room for more information. Over time, this happens a lot. You install programs and uninstall others. Add data and then delete it. Your "Legos" get moved around and separated from one another. After a while, it's about as tidy as the t-shirt table at Old Navy around closing time on Black Friday.

Now remember we said that Windows didn't need to keep all of the "Legos" from your file together to read them, but it does eventually make them slower to access. Imagine you are now trying to put the "Legos" together to read your midterm paper, and instead of being all lined up in a row, they are spread out all over your house. Even if you know exactly where they all are, it's still going to take longer for you to run around and put them together than if they were all neatly in one place. This is how a fragmented hard drive can slow your computer down over time. Like trying to recall all 50 states upon returning home from a healthy dose of nitrous oxide at the dentists office.

It's good practice to defragment your hard drive every few months or so, and Windows even has a built in utility to do so. You can access it in the Computer Management area of your Administrative Tools in the Control Panel. I'm not taking you through step by step, because I am not too jazzed with the performance of the built in utility. It reminds me of cleaning my room when I was a kid by  throwing everything in the closet. It looked tidy but wasn't really thoroughly clean. Instead, I'm going to have you use a free application called UltraDefrag. Download it here, and follow the installation wizard. Open it up and click the "Analyze" button to get a break down of how fragmented your drive is. Now, click the "Defragment" button and let it do its job. Easy peasy freesy...just how I like it!