So you may or may not have heard of the term defragmentation or defragging before. Over time files on your computers hard disk become widely spread apart and as a result applications and documents take longer to open. You will often hear the technical term as ‘fragmented’ or ‘fragmentation’. Defragging in simple terms is a process carried out that aligns all of your software & files back together again, ultimately returning performance lost over time.

Common Scenarios

If you have Windows 7 or Vista, defragging is automatically scheduled for 1AM every Wednesday but who has their computer on at that time? If you were to start it during your working day it would severly impact the performance of your PC whilst trying to work.

Windows XP user? There is a built in disk defragmentation tool but unlike the above it is not automatically scheduled.

So how do I go about defragmenting my hard drive?

I normally suggest running a scheduled job once a week but the key thing to remember is that it will impact the performance of your computer whilst it is running. If you take a lunch break at consistent time or you make dinner for the kids in the evening – this is the time when the defrag job could start.

I personally like to use a piece of software called Defraggler – made by Piriform. In my opinion it works far more efficiently than the software built into Windows and it has far more configuration options when scheduling jobs. Such as shutting down your PC when the job has finished.

Whilst all the above should improve PC performance in most scenarios, it is only one piece of the puzzle!

Note: If you have spent the money to have a Solid State Disk (SSD) installed in your PC then defraggler will automatically notify you that defragmenting the drive will reduce it’s lifetime. In this case uninstall defraggler and don’t worry!

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