For those of us using Windows, we are haunted by the inner-workings of the NTFS file system. All through the life of Microsoft file systems, fragmentation has been a major performance issue. Now that drives are getting larger and larger, and files vary from a few bytes to a few gigabytes, defragmentation is becoming more important.
Windows Vista introduced the feature of scheduled defragmentations. When enabled by
English: Screenshot of Auslogics Disk Defrag which is a freeware disk defragmenting utility for Microsoft Windows which aims at speeding up the user’s computer and optimizing the file system by means of defragmentation. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
default, it would defragment once a week. Fragmentation is a major issue I notice with users who have operating systems older than Vista who are just unfamiliar with running defragmenter.
Most people leave their computers on all the time. Why not defragment daily?
It makes a lot of sense. It does not ware your drive down to defragment daily, it doesn’t waste power if you are planning to leave your computer on anyways — if you are going to leave your computer on at night every day it might as well do something.
I’ve begun to recommend that people set up their defragmenter to defragment every day at a time when they almost never use their computer. The Windows filesystem develops fragmentation quickly and is a huge cause in slowing down a computer. Running daily makes sense in keeping on top of it.
I recommend using Defraggler. Defraggler has the ability to do a boot-time defragment and can take care of defragmenting files that are normally locked, it also allows you to create a schedule. This is an especially good solution for those running Windows XP or lower, as pre-Vista defragmenter does not allow scheduling. You can read my article about Defraggler here (Zylblog).
Resources:
Visit Defraggler’s website: http://www.piriform.com/defraggler
Download from Filehippo: http://filehippo.com/download_defraggler/
Read on Wikipedia in the most complicated terminology possible the causes of fragmentation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defragmentation
An article about speeding up your computer: https://zylblog.com/2011/06/speeding-up-your-computer/ (Zylblog)
