An easy way to speed up your computer is to defragment hard drive. In one sense, hard drives are very efficient. But in another sense, they are very inefficient.
Here’s how a hard drive stores data.
How Hard Drives Work
In short, the only thing organized about a hard drive is its “table of contents” which points to all the areas on a hard drive where a collection of data resides. Otherwise, a hard drive can become very fragmented.
When a hard drive becomes fragmented over time, the seek time (the time it takes a hard drive to fetch all the relevant data) increases dramatically.
Defragging a hard drive moves all related data together, making the hard drive heads move to only one place versus many, thus reducing seek time and speeding up your computer.
Simple Tip: Schedule a hard disk defragment once per week overnight when you’re not using your computer. By morning, your hard drive will be defragged.
Windows comes with a defragging utility (%SystemRoot%system32dfrg.msc).
However, there’s a better FREE utility for disk defragmentation and it’s called JkDefrag.
Simply schedule it to run once a week at off-hours and you’re all set. This utility works better than the Windows-supplied mechanism — it’s faster and does not freeze up like Windows’ does.
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