Step 4 - Defragment Your Hard Disk


Step 4—Defragment Your Hard Disk

Windows XP comes with a utility called Disk Defragmenter that’s an essential tool for tuning your hard disk. Disk Defragmenter’s job is to rid your hard disk of file fragmentation, which occurs when a file is stored in multiple places on a partition. Defragmenting files stores them contiguously, which greatly improves hard-disk performance because Windows XP can load each file from a single location on the disk.

Before using Disk Defragmenter, you should perform a couple of housekeeping chores:

  • Delete any files from your hard disk that you don’t need, as described in the previous section. Defragmenting junk files only slows down the whole process.

  • Check for file-system errors by running Check Disk as described in Step 1 of this chapter.

Running the Disk Defragmenter Tool

Follow these steps to use Disk Defragmenter:

  1. Select Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Defragmenter. Alternatively, in Windows Explorer, right-click the drive you want to defragment, select Properties, and then select the Tools tab in the dialog box that appears. Click the Defragment Now button. Either way, the Disk Defragmenter window appears, as shown in Figure 12-5.

    click to expand
    Figure 12-5: Use Disk Defragmenter to eliminate file fragmentation and improve hard disk performance.

  2. Select the drive you want to defragment.

  3. Click Analyze. Disk Defragmenter analyzes the fragmentation of the selected drive and then displays its recommendation (for example, You should defragment this volume).

  4. Click View Report for fragmentation details in the Analysis Report window. If you don’t want to defragment the drive, click Close; if you want to defragment the drive, click Defragment.

Defragmenting from the Command Line

If you want to schedule a defragment or perform this chore from a batch file, you need to use the DEFRAG command-line utility. Here’s the syntax:

DEFRAG volume [-a] [-f] [-v]

 volume 

Specifies the drive letter (followed by a colon) of the disk you want to defragment.

-a

Tells DEFRAG to only analyze the disk.

-f

Forces DEFRAG to defragment the disk, even if it doesn’t need defragmenting or if the disk has less than 15 percent free space. (DEFRAG normally requires at least that much free space because it needs an area in which to sort the files.)

-v

Runs DEFRAG in verbose mode, which displays both the analysis report and the defragmentation report.




Insider Power Techniques for Microsoft Windows XP
Insider Power Techniques for Microsoft Windows XP (Bpg-Other)
ISBN: 0735618968
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 126

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