4 All Memory Blog

So it’s the middle of February and you’ve scarfed some turkey, filled your belly with Grandma’s apple pie, guzzled some egg nog, and had a few too many plates of nachos at the Super Bowl party and it’s time to finally start that New Year’s Resolution to lose some weight. Fair enough. I wish you the best of luck. However, you’re not the only one that needs to trim a little extra you off the sides. Take a look at your computer. I’ll bet there are tons of extra files, programs, and unneeded code bloating your hard drive. One really easy thing you can do to speed up your hard disk when it gets really bogged down is to defragment it, or if things get really bad, reformat it.

When your computer writes files to your hard drive, it does so in clusters. It tries to put all the files and data associated with a certain program together in the same spot. The problem is that we humans actually do things with our computers besides just turn them on and listen to them hum. We end up installing and uninstalling programs, editing and deleting photos of Uncle Albert’s sixth wedding, transferring Kenny G albums to MP3 and then realizing Kenny G isn’t really that cool and deleting the MP3 files, and generally wreaking havoc on our poor hard drives. Doing all this leaves bits and pieces of empty hard disk that gets filled whenever you add more data and programs to the mix. At the end of the day, your hard disk ends up looking like that hideous patchwork quilt Albert’s fourth wife made you for Christmas a few years back. Everything should be nice and organized on the disc doesn’t have to work as hard to read the files.

Defragmenting takes all those bits and pieces of data scattered around your disk and reorganizes them and puts contiguous files back in proximity to each other. This allows your disk find necessary files without having to traverse the entire hard drive, going back and forth like a dog sniffing out cookie crumbs on a kitchen floor. Windows has a perfectly capable defragmenting tool built right into it. Just go to Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Defragmenter. I’d recommend defragmenting right now if you’ve had your computer for over a year and have never done it. Going forward, try to do it once every four months. Some experts have differing opinions as to when and how often you should defrag, but I’ve always felt it’s better to keep something maintained than let it get out of hand. Keep in mind that unless your disk is in really bad shape, defragmenting won’t increase the speed that much, but it will make a difference. If you have a Mac or a Windows Vista powered machine, then you don’t even have to worry about defragging.

Now if you’re computer is beyond hope, it may be time to reformat and just start over. I’m warning you; formatting your computer’s hard drive will erase EVERYTHING. Don’t do this unless you’ve prepared yourself mentally for completely starting over and have backed up everything worth keeping, like those photos from Uncle Albert’s first wedding. The easiest way to do it is to put your Windows installation CD or DVD into the disc drive and restart the machine. A warning should come up asking you to run the installation disk. Press whatever key is necessary to start the process. Easy squeezy, no?

So there you have it. If you follow some of Beth and Veneta’s advice on keeping your computer clean and orderly to begin with, you shouldn’t really have to do much to it. However, sometimes one must do some spring cleaning. Now get to the gym and trim some of those holiday and Super Bowl party pounds off so you look really nice for Uncle Albert’s next foray into the happily ever after.

Cheers,
Justin

Recommended Reading:

eHow
SmartComputing
GeekGirls
Wikipedia