How to Defragment Your Computer

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Michael Burton with michaelburtonfilms.org located in Salt Lake City, Utah and we are here talking about how to use Microsoft Windows. Now I want to talk to you about how to defragment your computer thus making your computer run faster. Let me start off by saying that Windows XP is a registered trademark of Microsoft and I am in no way affiliated with Microsoft. O'kay defragmentation of your computer is so important. As a matter of fact I don't think a lot of people understand, at least not in my family that defragmenting your computer is one thing that helps your system be healthy and it lets your system run better. We all get files on our computer that we get on, we delete, we upload more, we upload programs, we delete certain files, we delete music, we delete videos, we upload more, we download stuff off the internet. We are always moving and shifting around files. So our system gets bogged down with all these files and programs and then when we start deleting things and we are also reinstalling new programs the computer has got to find a place to put it and so you know you have a certain amount of space on your computer and what defragmentation does is it takes all the gaps that have been created by you deleting your programs and reinstalling programs and then you deleting those and reinstalling other video clips or whatever it is it takes those gaps and moves those files around to close the gaps and basically makes it easier for your archives to find your programs and your files a lot easier. Let me show you how this works. If you go into your Start Menu and you go to your Control Panel. Open your Control Panel and again under Performance and Maintenance is where you will find the defragmentation. It is right here. What I like to do is I like to do a free up space on your hard disk first and what that does is that gets rid of any unnecessary files that you don't need any more, temporary internet files and programs that you are not using any longer. When you are on the internet your internet downloads certain files to your temporary internet files which keeps the websites running faster when you go to them but they are unnecessary and they take up space on your hard drive. But the moment you delete them it leaves gaps and holes in your computer system so eventually if your computer is running really slow and stuttery or it takes along time to boot this could mean that you need to defragment your computer. If you scroll down here you can also set up under scheduled tasks you can also set up a defragmentation on a weekly basis. I actually do it on about a weekly basis if not twice a week because I am always uploading and deleting files and so my computers seem to get really bogged down and they run really slow. If you go up here to where it says rearrange items on your hard disk to make programs run faster, that is a defragmentation and go ahead and click on that one and let's open it up and let's drag that down to the center of the screen. This is your disk defragmenter menu here. This shows you the different drives that you can defragment any drive and let's go ahead with the C drive. We are going to highlight the C drive and then when we scroll down here to the bottom this says we can either analyze or defragment. If you click defragment it will automatically analyze your hard drive before it defragments but I just click analyze anyway and let's click analyze and it will show you what happens at the top here, right up above here. As you can see over here in the center it says that it is analyzing. Now you see all these colored bars that is telling us you should defragment the following and let me tell you why. Let's click those. If you notice all these colored bars we also have a key down here that shows us the different colors and what they mean. The fragmented files are the red which is what we are worried about. The blue is the contiguous files, the unmovable files and the free space. You can tell by these bars that we don't have much free space by these colors. There is not much white. The blue are some pretty big files that I don't move a lot and of course the green are unmovable that we don't move. The red is the fragmented space that we want to get rid of and as you can see there is quite a bit of red space. The bigger the chunk means the bigger the file that originally occupied that space. Most likely it was a video clip or something. This is your estimated disk usage before our defragmentation so it shows you what your disk space looks like. You have got a lot of fragmented files and barely any disk space so what we are going to do is we are going to click defragment and under here it is going to show our estimated disk usage after the defragmentation. So after the defragmentation runs. So once we click on defragment it goes into the like I said the analyzation mode again where it is going to analyze your system. Now it is saying we don't have enough free space in order to run the defragmentation because technically you have to have at least 15% of space on the computer to run the defragmentation and we have 12% but it says that you only use 7% for the disk defragmenter so technically we shouldn't be running the disk defragmenter. I'm going to show you how to do it. I'm going to click yes to go ahead and run it so you can see what happens. What happens is now we have this bar down at the bottom that says estimated disk usage after the defragmentation so as the computer is being defragmented the red spots should begin to disappear. Now because of the lack of space on the system I don't want to run this too long because I don't know if it is really going to do much or not. That just means that I need to clear off a few more files but basically what you should see down here is no red marks at all and mostly all white."