Defragmenting Your Hard Drive With Windows XP

During the course of you using your pc you will, undoubtedly, open, update, and generally change many files. During this process the alterations you make to a file are held in memory until such times as you save the document. Now, let us say that the file you are currently editing is 10K (Kilobytes) in size. That 10K has already been allocated a place on your hard drive. Let us now suppose that the editing you are doing to the file adds a further 5K to the file size, making a total of 15K. Windows has already allocated 10K for the file, and now it is 15K. Well it doesn’t take a mathematician to realise that your new 15K file will not fit into the 10K space allocated. So what does Windows do? Well if there is available free space next to your files original location on the hard drive the space is expanded to accommodate the latest update. If, which is usually the case, adjacent space is not available, then Windows dumps the 5K at another free location on the hard drive. This is okay because Windows knows where it has put the file and can easily recover it. However it is untidy.

The same thing happens when you delete a file. Although nothing is physically deleted, the space occupied by the file you have deleted is marked as free and, until another file takes its place, Windows leaves a gap.

To make your hard drive more efficient every ‘piece’ of a file needs to be together (better known as contiguous). Regularly defragmenting your hard drive does just that. It makes sure that all your file segments are in a contiguous form on the hard drive. This makes accessing the file quicker, thus improving performance.

How do I Defragment my drive

Defragmenting the hard drive is really straight forward. The first thing you need to do is click the Start button and then from the Start Menu click on Control panel (see Fig 1)

fig 1 control panel

Fig: 1 Control Panel

Next look for the Administrative Tools Icon and click on it. (Fig 2)

fig 2 administrative tools

Fig: 2 Administrative Tools Window

Next click on the Computer Management Icon to open the Computer Management Window (Fig 3)

fig 3 computer manaugement window

Fig: 3 Computer management Window

The Computer Management window is divided into two panes. The pane on the left contains the main menu items. Take a look at the list of items and then click on the Disk Defragmenter option. The defragmenter window will then open (Fig 4)

fig 4 disk defrag window

Fig: 4 Disk Defragmenter Windows

As you can see, this window is divided into three panes. The main menu is on the left. The partition information relating to your hard drive is situated in the top right pane, while a hard drive partition graph is situated in the bottom pane of the main window.

To begin defragmenting the drive you first need to highlight the drive/partition you want to defragment (Fig 5).

fig 5 selecting the relevant drive

Fig: 5 Selecting the relevant drive or partition

Once you have done this the window display will change slightly and you will notice that a number of buttons have appeared at the bottom of the window. To see if your hard drive needs defragmenting click the Analyse button. The defragmenter will thoroughly check your drive/partition to see if defragmenting is required.

Once defragmenter has finished analysing the drive/partition a message will appear stating, either that the drive does not need defragmenting, or that it does. If the drive doesn’t need defragmenting then simply close the defragmenter application window.

If, however, the drive does require defragmenting then press the Defragment button. The drive/partition will now start to defragment. Please note that this may take some time, but you can see what is happening by watching the lower graph. The top graph indicates the analysed state of the drive/partition. The lower one indicates the defragmentation progress. (Fig 6)

fig 6 defragmentation in progress

Fig: 6 Defragmentation in progress

Once Windows has finished defragmenting your drive/partition a message will appear indicating that the process has been completed. You can now close the defragmentation application.

For best results you should endeavour to defragment your hard drive/partition at least one a month. If you regularly edit large numbers of files then you should be looking at defragmenting every two weeks or so.