How to Speed Up a Hard-Disk Drive

No one ever bought a car or a computer because it could go slower. If your hard-disk drive seems to take forever to go about its business, or if it's having trouble keeping up with your CD-R burning software, chances are it's time for a tune-up and defragmentation.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

For Windows

1. Close any open applications. Disable antivirus utilities, screen savers and other background programs. Make sure you've quit all programs in Windows by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete once (don't press it twice or you'll restart the computer).

2. Windows will show you a list of applications running. Highlight each application (one at a time) and click on End Task to close each one.

3. Double-click on My Computer to open the My Computer window.

4. Select the hard disk that you want to defragment.

5. Choose Properties from the shortcut File menu. You should see the Properties window for the drive that you selected.

6. Choose the Tools tab.

7. Click the Defragment Now button.

For Mac OS

8. Apple doesn't supply a disk-defragmentation program with Mac OS, although most third-party disk utility programs include one.

9. If you don't opt for a third-party utility program, you can do a partial defragmentation by copying as many files as possible to a backup disk. Don't include the System Folder.

10. Once the files are safely copied, then delete them from the original disk.

11. Copy the backed-up files back to the original disk.

Tips & Warnings

• Check heavily used disks for fragmentation on a regular basis, as part of a regular maintenance routine (the Maintenance Wizard in later versions of Windows can help you set one up).
• Disk defragmentation is dangerous to your data and should never be undertaken without first backing up all data and then performing a general diagnostic routine. (See How to Fix Bad Sectors on a Hard Disk.)

[lordkhomar]

on 7/10/2009 Good tips on defragging your drive.

on 7/27/2006 Each time you visit a website, a temporary Internet file is created, and cookies sent, and they stay there. It takes lots of RAM. I delete them weekly, and I'm running 87% free space on my hard drive. Start to control panel, double click Internet options. On the general tab, click delete files, it will take a while, depending on the amount of disk space used. Next click delete cookies, and clear history as well (beware the malware using 'open' sites in the background). Click OK.

Part 2: Start to All Programs/ Accessories/ System Tools/ Disk cleanup. You see a window with all the files deleted previously,check marked into a kind of recycle bin. See the amount of space used by those "temporary files"?. Go ahead, click OK. Voilà, you have a clean disk.

Now you run the defragmentation application and you will be speeding up the Internet highway, till next stop.