Disk Defragmentor in Windows XP

Defragging your hard drive is one of the most overlooked PC maintenance tasks, yet one of the most simplest ways to keep your PC running fast.  When your files are organized, your hard drive has to work less to retrieve data, which speeds up the computer and potentially saves the hard drive from premature death. 

The way you defrag the hard disk is determined by the Operating System you have. In XP you can navigate to the defragmenter utility by going to Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools and then Disk Defragmenter.  You can also open My Computer and right-click the hard drive, then click Properties and look under the Tools tab.

You will select the hard drive you want to defragment and click Analyze to see the state of the drive. The computer will take a moment to test the hard disk, then show you a graphical representation of the drive. Mostly blue bands indicate a healthy state on contiguous files. Scattered red bands indicate fragmented files. If you have a lot of these, Windows will prompt you to defrag and you should accept when ready. You will want to plan this operating in advance as you will not be able to use the PC while this utility is running. Writing to the disk as the disk organizing files will cause an error.

You should consider doing this before bed, as it could take a few hours to complete depending on the size of the drive. If defragmenter produces errors, consider running defrag from within Safe Mode, where most services are stopped and nothing is using the drive.

How often should I Defrag My Drive?

How often you defrag the hard drive depends on your usage. If you are constantly adding and removing large files, you will need to do this often. If you do general PC work, ie. checking Emails, working on spreadsheets, etc you will only need to perform this task about every two months.

If you have any questions about defragging your hard disk, join our free message boards and ask the tech professionals.

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