How to Speed Up Your Computer By Defragmenting Your Hard Disk

This guide will show you how you can improve load times and actually slightly speed up your computer by defragging a drive.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. Hard drives often become cluttered after prolonged use and it is a good idea to defragment them every so often. For your main drive that you use most, I suggest a defrag every 6-12 months. Consider more often if you download lots of music and videos from the internet. By defragging your drive, you will free up more space and files will load faster.

2. Defragging a drive is really a simple process. Every PC should come with a program called 'Disk Defragmenter.' To find it, simple click the windows button or start button and find the 'Accessories' folder. There should be another folder called 'system tools.' In this folder is where Disk Defragmenter is found. Click the icon to open the program.

3. Always analyze a drive before you defrag. Sometimes a drive will not actually need to be defragmented, it just depends on how much you use it and if you are constantly installing/uninstalling programs or files. If the program suggests that a drive be defragmented, start the process and let it run overnight. It is not a great idea to run other programs while a drive is defragging.

[pctechguy]

on 9/15/2009 Don't forget that you can also speed up your computer by repairing and cleaning out your registry. For an online scan and link to a great automated tool for this, please visit: http://tinyurl.com/fixpcregistry