If your computer is running not so fast as of late there are several factors that could be the reason for the problem. One prime candidate for being the culprit of your computer slowness is file fragmentation. File fragmentation can take place on any pc, it is not a signal of poor hardware or bad programming or any human errors. This file fragmentation sets in as a product of simple physics. It is something that should be looked at occasionally as it takes a while to build up, so once every six months or so should be sufficient for defragmenting your hard drive. In this article I am going to make clear what precisely file fragmentation is, why it comes about, and what you can do to fix it.
What is file fragmentation? The reply to that query demands a good deal of an explanation. There is not a simple answer. For those of you who recollect vinyl albums, those are good physical depictions of the logical arrangement of a hard drive. The disc of the hard drive is circular and it has a sequence of concentric rings. Each of those rings is broken up into segments and each of those segments can hold a specific amount of information. When your computer saves information on your hard drive the data cannot overlap segments. So that when information is bigger than what can fit in one sector the information is divided into two separate pieces. Ideally those two separate pieces would then be stored into adjacent segments of the hard disk. In that case the data would still not be fragmented. Occasionally however there are not enough adjacent segments on the hard drive to save a complete set of data and so one portion of the information has to be saved in a completely separate area of the hard disk. Now you have fragmented data. It's not a serious concern but it does contribute to the amount of time it takes to get the file next time you want use it.
The reasons why information cannot always be saved in adjacent sectors of the hard drive are fairly basic and easy to understand. The adjacent sectors already have data from other programs or files. The more programs you have installed and the number of times that you install and uninstall different programs adds to the amount of fragmentation on your hard disk. The solution is pretty simple though. We simply need to run a disk defragmentation tool.
The tool that I highly recommend using for defragmenting a Windows based computer is smart defrag. Do a Google search for Smart defrag, download it, and install it. This tool is very simple and easy to use but it will require quite a bit of time so be prepared to start the utility and then walk away for an hour or two while it does its work.
What is file fragmentation? The reply to that query demands a good deal of an explanation. There is not a simple answer. For those of you who recollect vinyl albums, those are good physical depictions of the logical arrangement of a hard drive. The disc of the hard drive is circular and it has a sequence of concentric rings. Each of those rings is broken up into segments and each of those segments can hold a specific amount of information. When your computer saves information on your hard drive the data cannot overlap segments. So that when information is bigger than what can fit in one sector the information is divided into two separate pieces. Ideally those two separate pieces would then be stored into adjacent segments of the hard disk. In that case the data would still not be fragmented. Occasionally however there are not enough adjacent segments on the hard drive to save a complete set of data and so one portion of the information has to be saved in a completely separate area of the hard disk. Now you have fragmented data. It's not a serious concern but it does contribute to the amount of time it takes to get the file next time you want use it.
The reasons why information cannot always be saved in adjacent sectors of the hard drive are fairly basic and easy to understand. The adjacent sectors already have data from other programs or files. The more programs you have installed and the number of times that you install and uninstall different programs adds to the amount of fragmentation on your hard disk. The solution is pretty simple though. We simply need to run a disk defragmentation tool.
The tool that I highly recommend using for defragmenting a Windows based computer is smart defrag. Do a Google search for Smart defrag, download it, and install it. This tool is very simple and easy to use but it will require quite a bit of time so be prepared to start the utility and then walk away for an hour or two while it does its work.
No comments:
Post a Comment