Proper Care and Maintenance Of Your Hard Drive

Over the last few years as hard drives grew and grew, it seemed to me that it was less necessary to defrag hard drives. However, now that a lot of people are doing a lot more with their computers, and computers are lasting longer, it seems very necessary again. For the uninitiated, hard drives get fragmented (messy) as they get filled up. The result of this is that your computer takes a little bit longer to find files it needs, and computing is slower. Defragging your hard drive is the way to deal with this, and if you´re lucky, you´ll get a nice performance boost as a result.

All versions of Windows come with a built in defragmenter which while a little bit troublesome, works quite well, if you can get it to work. If you choose to use the Windows tool, plan on starting this at the end of the day, so that it can run overnight if necessary. This takes quite a while on large hard drives.

The first step to using the Windows tool is to start in safe mode, which you can choose by hitting the F8 key when you see the Starting Windows Menu right after starting the computer. You can run it in regular mode, but, and particularly under Windows 98 and ME, this can be a real pain in the Microsofties. Before you reboot the computer, you might want to run your regular backup, always a good idea when doing system maintenance.

Once you´ve booted into Windows, most people can run the Defragmenter by navigating to Start: Program: Accessories: System Tools and picking the defragmenter. Once your there, you only have a few choices to make, and you should be good to go. You might want to stick around for a few minutes though, and make sure that the computer doesn´t need you to perform any additional steps such as running scandisk.

Entire Document (print, email, or web page) Copyright 2004 by Steven M. Lastoe. All rights reserved.