Have you done a defrag recently?

Good Morning all. If you’re not using your machine it would be a good idea to tell it to defrag while you’re away. If you don’t know how, you have come to the right place. Today I will explain what is involved in de-fragmenting your machine and just what it is anyway.

What is it?

The term refers to de-fragmenting your hard drive. With use over time, data on your hard drive becomes fragmented, meaning that it gets split up over your drive instead of all being stored in the one spot. Once this happens it takes longer for the computer to retrieve the data for you and it can also leave small spaces between data resulting in wasted space on the hard drive. De-fragmenting your hard drive attempts to re-assemble these pieces into single blocks again.

When should you do it?

On average you should probably defrag your computer about once a month for a computer that is used daily, like an office computer. However if your computer has an SSD (Solid State Drive) you should not de-fragment it at all. This is because an SSD stores data differently than a regular hard drive and has a maximum number of writes and rewrites for its expected life span. Defragging an SSD can dramatically reduce its life span.

How to do it

Defragging a hard drive is a simple process on a windows based machine. Windows comes with its own defrag program called “disk defragmenter”. On new machines you can search for it using Cortana. On older machines it is located in tools in accessories. Once you open the program you simply click on the drive you want to defrag and tell it to defragment the drive. If you want to do a better job, there are a number of third party programs freely available on the web that you can install yourself. One such program is defraggler by piriform. You can find the link in our useful links page.