Defraggng Your Hard Drive.

Maybe you've heard people saying that you should regularly "defrag" your hard drive?

Sounds mysterious, but it's really a simple idea, and quite easy to do.

"Defragging" is just slang for de-fragmenting and refers to the fact that, when you delete a file from your hard drive, the space left behind will be sandwiched between two other remaining files. Later, when you save another file, this empty space may not be large enough to hold the complete new file, so part of the file will fit in the space, and the rest of the file will be stored somewhere else. This new file is therefore fragmented instead of being all together in one location. The computer's disk filing management system can cope with this, but it does tend to make things a bit untidy, and it slows the computer down. Your hard drive will be much more efficient if it is occasionally "de-fragged" - a process which involves tidying things up by moving groups of files into memory, and writing them back to the drive in a more orderly manner.

It's good practice to do this defragging, but there is some risk because, for part of the time, some of your files are temporarily in memory and absent from the hard drive. If you were to experience a power cut during defragging you could lose some of your files. For this reason the experts recommend backing up your important files before defragging.

One way of doing this (if you don't have any separate backup system) would be to make a new folder (call it "backup" if you like) and copy the important folders and files into it which you couldn't afford to lose (eg your document files). If you've done a file management course, you'll know how to do this. However, this is not really a guaranteed way of backing up files, because both the originals and the backups are still on your hard drive, but it's better than nothing. Having your important files in two places reduces the risk of losing them during defragging.

Mind you, there's also a risk in NOT defragging. The more fragmented your filing system is on the drive, the greater the chances of filing system errors. And remember, you can have a power failure at any time whether you're defragging or not; too bad if a file is being written to disk at the time!

How to Defrag

Do this job when you're not wanting to use the computer for anything else, so it can get on with the job without interruption (it's NOT a good idea to write letters on your computer or check emails etc to pass the time during defragging).

You should disable your virus protection program if you have one running in the background, as this can interfere with the defragging process.

(Often the virus protection program can be disabled by clicking on it's little icon on the taskbar (bottom right hand corner of the screen) with the right mouse button, then clicking the option for disabling or closing down the program, which appears in a little pop-up menu). If this doesn't apply, you'll need to read the Help files for your virus protection program.

Also disable the screen saver, as this will inevitably interrupt the defrag process and interfere with it. If you don't know how to disable the screen saver one crude but effective way to do it is to simply wait till the defrag operation has started, then click on the "start" button at the bottom left hand corner of the screen, and just leave the start menu window sitting
open. In this condition the screen saver won't start.

However, I've skipped over getting the defrag operation started.

It's simple. Just double click the "my computer" icon on the desktop, then click with the RIGHT mouse button on the icon for your C: drive.

From the drop down menu which appears, click on "properties" then "tools"

At the bottom of the "tools" window you will see a button which says "defragment now"

Click this button, confirm which drive you want to defragment, click the "start" option in the defrag window, and then be prepared to wait for quite some time.

The larger your drive, the longer it will take. If your drive is fairly badly fragmented it will take longer than if it is in a fairly tidy condition.

If you want to see a pictorial representation of what's happening during the defrag operation you can click on the "show details" button once the defrag operation has started.

Don't forget to disable the screen saver though, as described above, once defragging has started.

Once you're familiar with the procedure you will find it's not difficult to defragment regularly, say once a month for example.
John Selby.

First printed SNN Newsletter Nov-Dec 2000 and again in October 2001