Defragmenting your computer will speed up the time it takes for disk related activities to complete. This could be many things from copying a file, installing software, or anything that involves transferring data to or from the hard disk. Disk Defragmenter is a utility within Windows XP which will align the files on your hard drive, in a contiguous series, which increases read/write access. It is recommended that you run Disk Defragmenter once a month on your computer if the computer is frequently used. Let’s explain this concept in further detail.

A hard disk contains platters (round plates) which contain tracks and sectors. Hard disks can contain several platters, with each platter allowing data on both sides. As the illustration below shows, a sector is a part of the track of the “piece of the pie.”

 

 

More importantly when you install software or data (filling the hard drive sectors) to a new hard drive, the sectors are used in order of availability. Most sectors are 512 bytes each in size. It is easy to notice that most programs are larger than 512 bytes, and so more than one sector must be used to copy the data to the hard disk.

As programs are removed, this leaves a gap of empty sectors. If the next series of data to be written needs ten sectors and only five are available, it will fill the first available five and continue on to the next available sector(s). When data (or a program/file) is scattered across many sectors in this fashion, it is called fragmentation

Fragmentation can slow down system performance if the file system must direct the drive heads to several different addresses on the hard disk to find all the data in the file you want to read/write. The extra time for the heads to travel to a number of addresses causes a delay.

To start disk defragmenter, click the Start Button and select All Programs. Then, click Accessories and click System Tools. Here, you will see the Disk Defragmenter icon.

Once you click that icon, you will see this window:

 

 

The top portion of Disk Defragmenter shows you the available drives and their file system, capacity, amount of free space, and percent of free space. Also available are the Analyze button (to analyze a hard disk to see if disk defragmenter should be run on the hard disk) and a Defragment button (to start the defragmenting process).