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All about "De-Fragging" |
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| If
your computer is running slowly, you may have heard that you should
“de-frag” the computer. This probably sounds scary
and technical. If you’re wondering what it is, what it
does, and whether you should be doing it, you’re not alone!
Also, if you already de-frag regularly, you may be wondering why it doesn’t really seem to do much to improve the performance of your computer. “De-frag” is short for “de-fragmentation”. Before you can understand de-fragging, you first need to understand a bit about how your computer stores and retrieves files. Everything on your computer is a file, including thousands of files in the operating system, the programs you’ve loaded (like Microsoft Office®), and all the data files you’ve saved as you do your work. Think of your computer's hard drive as if it was an old-fashioned desk with one pigeonhole for each file, and a bunch of extra pigeonholes for the free space. When the computer is first loaded, all the files are put into the pigeonholes in a nice, organized way, filling the top pigeonholes first, and continuing until they're all filled in order, with the empty ones left in a block at the end. If you’re working at your desk, you'll pull files out of some of the pigeonholes and work with them. But when you put them back, you may not put them in the same place. If you're in a hurry, you may just pop the files into whatever space is empty, and pull out the next batch out to work with. Your computer does a similar thing with your hard drive. And, just like you, after a while it doesn't know exactly where to look for things any more, so it has to search. De-fragging is the equivalent of pulling everything out of the pigeonholes, figuring out what it is and where it belongs, and re-filing it neatly so that all the top pigeonholes are filled and the bottom ones are left in a neat, empty block. Once this is done, your computer knows where everything is again, and doesn’t need to search. This used to be a vital procedure back in the days when computers ran much more slowly, hard drives were smaller, and computers had less RAM memory. Now that we have so much more horsepower at our fingertips, we don't even notice the extra nanoseconds that it takes the computer to search for the files it needs. That's why you likely won’t notice any real performance difference after you de-frag. However, de-fragging also gives your computer a chance to check over its hard drive, and mark any sectors (pigeonholes) that have gone bad and can’t be trusted to store data accurately any more. So is it worth the trouble? The bottom line is that if your computer seems to be having a lot of errors or corrupted files, try doing a de-frag. You can find it by clicking the Start button, and then following the menus through All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and selecting Disk Defragmenter. But in most cases, you won’t really notice any performance improvement from running a de-frag. By: Diane Henders, Bright Ideas Personalized Learning Inc. For more information or computer training services, please call Bright Ideas Personalized Learning at (403) 269-2347. |
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