How to Defragment a Hard Drive and Optimize Virtual Memory

By eHow Computers Editor

Rate: (1 Ratings)

Defragging your computer can optimize its performance. When your computer seems to be running slow, defragging your hard drive will save you a considerable amount of time. This consolidates files that have been broken apart and spread around the computer.

Flag Article

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Step1

Select "Start" from the bottom corner of the screen. A pop up window will appear with several options, including All Programs. Select "All Programs" by clicking on it or holding the mouse over the option.

Step2

Click "Accessories" for the next window to appear. It may appear to either side of this menu with another window. Select "System Tools" and then "Disk Defragmenter" from the following pop-up menus.

Step3

Pick the hard drive you wish to defragment in the Disk Defragmenter window by highlighting it and clicking once.

Step4

Select "Analyze" to see how much space you will be gaining by going through with the defragmentation. If the results come back and say that defragmentation is not necessary you can choose to go ahead and do it, or choose other ways to optimize the hard drive.

Step5

Choose "Defragment" if the results of the Analyze process said that it would be beneficial. This process takes quite a bit of time depending on how large the hard drive. Be sure you don't need to access you computer for anything while it is defragging. Click "OK" when the process is completed.

Step6

Change the size of the Virtual Memory Paging Size by selecting "Start", "Control Panel", "System" then go to the "Advanced" tab.

Step7

Click the "Settings" button in the Performance box and a Performance Options window will appear. Again select the "Advanced" tab at the top of the window. Choose "Change" in the Virtual Memory box. The next window is where you can customize the paging file size for each of the drives. Reboot the system for changes to take effect.