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Home arrow What is that "Defragmentation" Thing?
What the heck is that "Defragmentation" thing? PDF Print E-mail
So some of you when you first purchased your computer were told to make sure to defragment your hard drive regularly to keep it running smoothly.  "Ok, sure, no problem", you said, but "What the heck does it do? and is it really that neccessary?"

Ok, so let's get some things straightened about what "defragging" does.  Defragmentation is the proccess of rearranging information/data in an uninterrupted "line".

When you use your computer, files(peices of information used to make up programs such as internet explorer) are continually being opened, moved around, added to and
deleted.  During this process, the data that is used becomes scattered.  For instance, you open a document in your word processor that you were using last week. You then type out another whole page to add to what you had before.  When you go to save this document, that additional page will be saved to a different location on your hard drive than the first part of the document because during that week you've used your computer for other things as well, causing data/information to be saved on the hard drive in the space after that document. This occurence is called "Fragmentation".

Fragmentation is what happens to a file over time. The information in that file ends up scattered all over your hard drive.  When you go to use that file, your computer must search several spots of your hard drive to retrieve the file in its entirety.

So by now you probably are getting the picture of what "Defragmentation" would do.  Basically using a program designed to search out your hard drive and make each file
an uninterrupted unit by copying each fragment of the file into one location, is defragmentation.

There are many theories over whether your computer is sped up to the point of noticable improvement.  Computers move at such lightning fast speeds nowadays that a simple defrag may not show any visible signs of improving speed. Although there will be an increase, it may be hard to see the difference.

In any case, Defragmentation is a recommended proccess. Most windows based systems have one that comes with the operating system.  You can usually find it by going to: START>(All programs for WinXP)>Accessories>System Tools> and you should see something like "Disk Defragmenter" in the menu.  You can even set up a schedule for it to run automatically.  Usually once a week, or even a month, is the recommended time for a defragment.
 
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