In the posts from June 6th and June 11th 2008 I started a series of articles on how to speed up your computer. In part one we discussed managing startup programs on your computer. Then in part two we cleaned up your registry.
Now in Part 3 we will deal with a major problem on a lot of peoples computers, a fragmented harddrive. I’m not saying that this is something that everyone has issues with, you might be like me and having your computer at peak performance is a must, but if you’ve never defragmented your computer then you probably should read this article. Especially if you use your computer quite often. For those of you who do defrag your computer on a regular basis, you should read this article because of this awesome piece of software, IObit Smart Defrag, that I show you how to use.
So what exactly is this whole “fragmented hard drive” stuff? Well you can either read the brief description I’m about to give you, or you can play this awesome little addicting game called Defrag by matthewbot (will not work with Vista – sorry), or you might even want to do both.
Your computer’s hard drive is divided into thousands of little sectors that store pieces of information. Now in a non-fragmented hard drive the disc reader can go through and read consecutive sections in order to read a file. But if your hard drive is fragmented then the disc reader has to hunt throughout the hard drive to find the different pieces of a file. This is caused from when writing a file to the hard drive it can’t fit it in just one spot and so has to use multiple spots. Of which this can make your hard drive look like a mess quite easily.
As your hard drive fragments then the time it takes to open a file will get longer because it has to hunt for the different portions of the file. The more your hard drive becomes fragmented, the more files will be affected, and the slower your computer will become.
There is a solution though, and a very one at that….Defrag Software! I’m going to show you how to use something called IObit Smart Defrag, but you can use any defragger you want, I mean Windows includes one with the Operating System. And if you can’t figure this out, defrag software will organize your hard drive, thus speeding up your computer. So please download IObit Smart Defrag here.
The great thing I like about this software, besides it being free, having an awesome interface, and is quite easy to use – is the fact it will also optimize your hard drive and not just defragment it. Plus you can even have it start up automatically and defrag your computer in the background so you’ll never have to do it again.
When you open it up, it will look something like this:
IObit
Very easy to use, like I said. Basically all you need to do is swith the drop down menu to “Defrag & Optimize” and hit “Go”. I mean you could analyze it first if you want, but this will analyze it at the beginning also. Also be sure that you’re computers going to be on for a couple hours that are usually needed to run this. If you want you can even click the checkbox to have the computer actually turn off when its done.
The window in the bottom half will start pixelizing into various colors, it is now analyzing. Hopefully all of you are capable of reading the legend at the bottom and can’t distinguish between the colors. But if you can’t, the more red you have the more fragmented your computer is.
After it’s done analyzing it will now do a mixture of optimizing and defragging. You will be able to see the process in the pixelized bottom as it rearranged various areas. Slowly but surely the red will turn to green.
You might not be able to feel the computer speed increase at first, but after you use it for a little while you’ll realize that it is going faster. Especially when opening up the C:\ drive. Also you may feel the start menu opens faster and programs open faster also (especially ones that have a lot of files included with them).
That concludes Part 3 on how to speed up your computer. In Part 4 we will mess around with Services.
