Even if you’ve only been actively using your computer for a short time, you’ve surely heard of defragmentation. Defragmenting the contents of a hard disk allows you to “reunite” and reorder the information that Windows saves in a fragmented manner in distant parts of the disk. This will speed up the time it takes for the system to retrieve files and programs.
This is a routine operation that is essential to maintain the state of form of a PC, and so today I decided to return to the subject by explaining in detail how to defragment your computer according to the operating system you use. You’ll see, it’s a lot less complicated than it sounds. In fact, to be honest, it’s a piece of cake!
If you want to learn how to defragment your computer, you must first take into account the operating system you have installed on your computer. If it is Windows 7, for example, you’ll have to do little or nothing, since this version of the Microsoft system includes an automatic defragmentation function that will reorder the files on the disk and optimize the PC’s performance without the user having to move a finger.
To make sure everything is set correctly (or if you want to customize the defragmentation settings), click on the Start button, search for Disk Defragmenter Utility using the search bar in the menu that opens and launch the program in question. In the window that opens, you will see a list of all hard drives and partitions on your PC with buttons to defragment them, analyze them or change their automatic defragmentation settings.
If you want to analyze the state of a drive to find out whether it needs to be defragmented, select it from the Disk Defragmenter Utility list and click the Analyze Disk button. If the result of the analysis gives you unhappy results (the response should arrive within a few minutes), start defragmenting the drive immediately by clicking the Defragment Disk button.
If you want to change the day or the frequency with which the automatic defragmentation is carried out, click on the Configure schedule button. In the window that opens, you can set the frequency with which the defragmentation is to be performed (daily, weekly or monthly), the day, the time and the disks to be defragmented. To save the settings, just click OK, in any case it is recommended to leave the default settings active with the weekly defragmentation.
To defragment your computer with Windows XP, the situation is a bit more complicated because the old version of Microsoft’s operating system does not automatically defragment the disk like Windows 7 (and Vista) does, but you have to do it on your own accord, remembering to defrag at least once a week.
To defragment your hard drive on XP, you need to go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Utilities and launch the Disk Defragmenter Utility. In the window that opens, select the drive you want to defragment and click on the Analyze button to find out the degree of data fragmentation on the disk or click on the Defragment button to start defragmentation right away.
If you find this routine annoying (indeed it is), try using a third-party disk defragmentation solution. I recommend the excellent IObit Smart Defrag that defragments your hard drive and optimizes your computer fully automatically. I told you about it in detail in my article on how to defragment.
If you use a Mac, you don’t have to worry about defragmentation. The file system used by the Apple operating system manages the files on the disk in such a way as not to fragment the content and therefore there is no need to perform the canonical defrag as on Windows. The same goes for Linux and all its distros (e.g. Ubuntu).