Defrag your computer once a month

So the honeymoon is over and you’ve settled into your routine with your once new computer. All of a sudden, you begin to notice things you didn’t see before. Web pages don’t load as fast as they used to. Programs don’t open as quickly. You could go to lunch break and be back by the time your computer is done starting. But, whatever it is, her performance just isn’t what it used to be. And if it’s not a virus or failing hardware, then what could it be?

Maybe it’s stress.

If a virus on a computer is like a cold, then having a fragmented hard drive could be seen as putting your computer through too much stress. Your computer’s hard drive is running back and forth, grabbing at bits and pieces of files and wearing itself out when all the bits and files could be condensed into their proper places, aka defragmenting.

But to understand a fragmented hard drive, we must understand how it gets like that to begin with. Imagine the programs on your computer. They all take up a finite amount of disk space. And a lot of times those programs get modified. Now, picture your hard drive as a sheet of paper. When you install a program, you find a space with no writing and write it in. As your hard drive fills with programs, some of the writing inevitably rubs up against each other. When a program is modified and expanded, there may not be room next to it to expand. So, the hard drive picks another empty space. Sometimes they can be pretty close, but sometimes they could be half a page away or further.

As the hard drive reads programs, it has to constantly dart back and forth to each and every little point, even if it the points are far away. Doing this takes a lot of time. And when a lot of programs are running, the hard drive struggles with operations it used to run flawlessly.

Defragmenting your hard drive takes all those little pieces and lines them up all together. The time to communicate between the pieces lessens and your computer is back to performing the way it was when you first got it out of the box. Doing this once a month will keep your computer stress free and make your life a little bit easier.