Optimizing Your Hard Drive
You’ve probably heard of this term once or twice, but if you are not sure how to go about it or more importantly what it does than you this article is for you.
First of all let’s get into the problems that most people encounter with their hard drives. As you delete files, add new ones and move around different files they become fragmented. This means that the “bytes” containing the files are not grouped together but scattered around the disk sector.
Another problem that occurs is that when one installs and uninstalls programs, although they are deleted from the system they still leave fragments of files in the dll folders and registry files. This can greatly slow down system performance and also cause security problems because if a program still has fragments of files left in on the computer after it is installed, they could be malicious.
So now that you know why it’s important to clean up and optimize your hard drive lets talk about how to go about doing it.
If you would like to do a basic clean up and optimization of your computer then you can use the proprietary Window’s system tools. This is very simple and straight-forward. Via the Start Menu, go to Accessories > System Tools > Disk Clean Up. The program will scan the disk for files it can delete such as those found in the temporary folders and recycling bin. Depending on how long since you have done such a cleanup you can clear between 500MB to 2GB.
The second step is to do a disk defragment. This can take some time depending on how many files you have on your computer and how long it has been since this task was done. To get the process going, visit the Accessories folder via the Start Menu; System Files > Disk Defragmenter.
For those who want something more powerful then the following three programs are very good at doing this. The three programs that can help you with this are WinDirStart, CCleaner and Auslogics Disk Defrag. WinDirStart allows you to view what is taking up space on your hard drive and does this via color coded areas.
CCleaner does a more thorough job of doing a disk clean-up than the free utility that comes with Window’s. It has some powerful features such as allowing you to just clean up Window’s files or third party files.
Last but not least is Auslogics Disk Defrag which copies the function of Disk Defragmenter, but does it in a more user friendly way.
All three programs will take some time to do their magic so it might be a good idea to grab a cup of your favorite beverage and read the news or set it up to do while you will not be using your computer.
Once the programs are finished running you should notice an increase in system performance. While this might not completely fix performance problems, it will greatly decrease the wait time for your programs to load.
It is recommended to do a disk defragmentation at least once every quarter.
