Scandisk and Defrag

One of the quickest and easiest ways to speed up your PC and ensure that it is running at it’s best is to run two programs, one after the other, called “Scandisk” and “Defrag”.   Let me explain why this works and helps keep your PC trouble free.

In your PC, you have a hard drive, this hard drive, typically around 60gb in size now a days, holds all your documents and program files, it also holds your operating system and in this case we will assume it is Windows 98se or Windows XP.   Your Hard Drive is a round spinning metal plate covered with the same coating that they put on a video or cassette tape, only of a much higher and finer grade.   There is a reading and writing arm on it, which floats literally thousands of an inch above the disk as it rotates at speeds in excess of 7000rpm.   When you ask for some information from your computer, it has to find the information to start up the program, then find the information and pass it all to your RAM, Random Access Memory and your CPU, Central Processing Unit.   It all then works together with your GPU, graphics card, to produce the document on your screen for you to edit or print etc.

Over time, the files on your hard drive get mixed up and fragmented.  Instead of all being nicely lined up in order on your hard drive, the more you work the more it spreads them around and dumps them anywhere it can find space, it is actually working for speed not neatness, so in the interests of speed if you ask for one thing and then another, it drops what it has in memory on your hard drive and goes off and finds what you just asked for.   So no wonder then that after time your hard disk becomes quite a mess with bits of information scattered all over the place.   Of course, the more this happens the slower your PC becomes as the hard drive has to work harder and harder trying to find where it dropped the last piece of information!

You can tidy up your hard drive very easily.  The first program checks for errors on your hard drive and is called Scandisk, you will find it under: Start/Programs/Accessories/System tools.   When you run this, it will check for any errors on your hard drive and correct them.  But that is all it does, it doesn’t tidy anything up, to do that you need “Defrag”.

You can find Defrag under:  Start/Programs/Accessories/System tools, too!   Start this up and it will ask you which drive you want to tidy.   If you have more than one drive in your PC, you can scroll down to the bottom and select “scan all drives”.

Then it is coffee time, at any rate, it’s best to go off and do something else, because if you hard drive is in a real mess it could take up to several hours to tidy up.   I tend to let this run over night, and I also tend to run both the programs again the next day too, just to make sure that it really is error free and tidy again.

Running these two simple programs will keep your PC running fast and smoothly and will also help stop you losing any valuable documents through disk errors.

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Last modified: January, 2006