About The Disk Defragmenter

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Ever wonder what that Disk Defragmenter does? You probably hear people talking about it every once in a while. Well, I won't go very deep into this article, but in a nutshell, Disk Defragmenter moves files in your computer which have been misplaced. I'm not talking about word documents either. I'm talking about old/uninstalled application files, etc. The Disk Defragmenter also works to fix corrupted/fragmented files. For most people, using the Disk Defragmenter might help their computer run more quickly, and possibly free-up space. This is all due to you allowing Disk Defragmenter to restore order to your system. Here's an example of what Disk Defragmenter can do before, and after the scan is run.


In this image above, this is what one of my computers looked like before running a defrag.


In this image above, this is what the same computer looked like after I ran the defragmenter.

Because many of you probably don't understand the color coding system, here's the key below:


As you can see, there is a dramatic difference between the two images! If you run the defragmenter, depending on your system speed, etc., this might take a while to run. The best time to do this is when you have spare time when you will not be using the computer. I hope this article has helped you somewhat! 

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- Carbon Dudeoxide

[Dilbert]

A quick note on how often to defrag

It is good computer hygene to run Defrag on a schedule. Frequent computer users, once a week, basic computer users (Word and similar programs only/mostly) only need to defrag about once a month. These are two extremes, and most users fall in-between. Pick a schedule that works for you and isn't over-excessive. You can't hurt anything by defragging once per hour, but hey, that's a waste of time and a pain.

You should also defrag after major file movements, like 500 MB or more. Moving files like this is never clear-cut for a PC; if it was, there would be no need to defrag. Actually, doing anything will slightly frag the computer (theoretically, running Defrag frags the system a tiny bit!), but it's big things like that you'll notice on the defrag screen.

[soybean]

Needless to say, the time needed to defragment a drive or partition in inversely related to the frequency of defragmenting.  In other words, the more often a drive is defragmented, the less time it will have between defragmentations to become fragmented, and so the next defragmentation will take less time.  

My hard drive is partitioned.  Today, I defragmented the partition on which Windows XP is installed and it only took between 5 and 6 minutes.

Indeed, I would argue that a positive point for deciding to devide a hard drive into partitions vs. having the whole drive in one partition is more efficiency, i.e. less time required overall, in keeping the drive defragmented.