Defragmenting your HDD

To keep your PC in tip top running order it is a good Idea to derfagment it regularly. Defragmenting takes all the data on the disk and moves it around so all the relevent data is closer together to speed up the accessing of the information on your hard drive and therefore help the computer to run faster.

Make sure you quit all programs you are running before you start, and it is a good idea to turn your screensaver off too.

1. Click on the Start button

2. Choose Programs

3. Choose Accesories

4. Choose System Tools

5. Left Click on Disk Defragmenter

(Don't worry if your start menu is not set out Exactly like this)

6. Select the drive you want to defragment (Drive "C" is your sustem drive). If you have more than 1 drive you can select the "All Hard Drives" option.

7. Click OK

The computer will now defragment your hard drive(s). This can take anything from 10 minutes to more than 2 hours, depending on the size of your drive and when you last defragmented it. The status monitor (above) tells you how far through the process it is.
There is a "Show Details" option where you can see the computer moving the data around the drive. Click here to see an example of this.

8. When it has finished quit the defragmenter by clicking "Yes"