How to Defragment & Free Up Space
As computers are used, hard drives become filled with data and fragments of information and files are saved sporadically across your hard drive. After a while, the used space on your hard drive in combination with the fragmented files can slow down your computer, making way for an unpleasant user experience. Performing system maintenance on your computer by defragmenting your hard drives and freeing up space by deleting temporary files can dramatically improve the speed at which your computer operates.
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Instructions
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How to Free Up Disk Space
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Click the "Start" button followed by "All Programs," "Accessories," "System Tools" and lastly "Disk Cleanup."
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Wait for Disk Cleanup to calculate how many files can be deleted to free up space.
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Scroll through the "Files to delete," and place a check next to the files you want to delete. Make sure to remove the check of any files you don't want to delete that are selected by default.
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Click "OK" once you have finished making your selections and confirm that you want to delete these files by clicking "Yes" when prompted with the warning.
How to Defragment Your Hard Drive
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Click the "Start" button followed by "All Programs," "Accessories," "System Tools" and lastly "Disk Defragmenter."
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Click the drive you want to defragment and click the "Analyze" button to determine if the drive needs to be defragmented.
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If it is recommended that you defragment your drive, click the "Defragment Disk" button.
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Click "Close" once the disk defragmenter has completed.
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Tips & Warnings
Be sure to carefully review what files will be deleted.
Running disk defragmenter may tie up your system resources for the duration of the process. It is best to run this utility when your computer is not in use.
