subject: A Simple, Free Way to Speed Up Your PC [print this page] A Simple, Free Way to Speed Up Your PC A Simple, Free Way to Speed Up Your PC
Very few people are conscious of the ways in which you can quicken a working computer. And very few of those people are aware that the easiest way is to simply defrag it's hard drive. Some OS's don't require the systems hard disk to be defragged, as it depends on which file system is used, but amongst the most common file systems are the type designed by Microsoft, as their PC's are now the ones most utilized throughout the globe. The two main Microsoft file systems currently available are FAT, and the other is NTFS. FAT is an extremely old file system, which has since been replaced by NTFS, however, many users still use FAT. FAT is still used either because it has to be for compatibility reasons with other programs, and / or as the user isn't awake to the benefits of using NTFS or simply doesn't know that it is possible to switch their PC's file system to NTFS with comfortable ease.
File space within a computers hard drive becomes fragmented gradually. This is a result of the way the PC is treated. Files are constantly being written onto your disk, updated, deleted and moved, this is just the way PC's were designed to be used. Unfortunately, the NTFS file system isn't very great at handling this operations, and over time, the files become fragmented. Fragmentation basically implies that data files will be stored in it's own block, but is then deleted from that block, or transferred to a different one. Due to the difference of the file size as well as block size, if a file will be stored in this block, it might not fit entirely in that block, so it'll be stored in this block, and stored in another block. A result of the file being separated (the end user lacks the information about this as it's done at the deep software level), after that it then makes it a slower process to gain access to this file, as rather than loading the file using a particular location, it now has to load it from two or more, which often can be spread throughout the drive in very different areas. This is actually the essence of fragmentation.
Defragmentation basically tries to organise these files with the intention that there stored in chronological order, therefore rendering it faster to access them. In every one of Microsoft's recent operating systems, you can see a software application called something along the lines of disk defragmenter', determined by which version of the OS you're running. This utility is used to defragment the hard drive, and potentially increase the speed of the data transfer speed, and therefore decrease the users waiting time.
