How to Defragment Your Windows XP Computer

Computer maintenance is very important to the wellbeing of you computer and your sanity! If you don’t keep up on things you may find your machine slowing down, crashing or even worse! Defragmenting is one way to keep your computer running smoothly! In this article you’ll find step-by-step instructions with photos to assist you in defragmenting your machine.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Computer running Windows XP
• Time

1. To defragment your drive go to START, ALL PROGRAMS, ACCESSORIES, SYSTEM TOOLS and finally click on DISK DEFRAGMENTER.
2. At this point you’ll get a window with two options, analyze and defragment. If you don’t know if it’s necessary for you to defragment your drive now click “analyze” and your system will let you know in a few seconds, or just click “defragment”. Once your system is defragmenting it may take a long time, the longer it takes the “worse” your drive was!
3. I recommend restarting your computer now so changes come into effect.

Tips & Warnings

• Check defragmenter once a month or after you’ve installed/removed any large files, if your system doesn’t get backlogged it takes less time to defragment!
• Defragmenting pushes all of the information on your disk closer together, freeing up space and making the accessing of files more efficient.