Defrag your hard drive once every couple of weeks. When you are constantly writing moving, creating and deleting files to your hard drive, those files aren’t written or deleted in one continuously line. One file could be written all over your hard drive. To access one file, the system has to look all over the drive to gather the bits for that file before it will open it up. “The more fragmented your hard drive is, the longer it will take to access files,†says Davis. “By defragging you take all of the little parts of that file and put them together in one location.†Doing this will help the drive load files faster. Some people may not have to do it that frequently. If you are a basic user who accesses email and Microsoft Office and you don’t add a lot of content to your hard disk you may not have to do that. But if you are a power user and you are constantly adding large content to your hard drive, like videos, photos, and games, then you will need to defrag often to keep your system fast and organized.
- To defrag your hard drive. Go to “My Computer.†Right click on your local disk. Scroll down to “propertiesâ€. Click on the “Tools†tab and then press the “Defragment Now†button. Be patient it can take a long time depending on how much fragmentation you have and how fast your computer is.