Monday, June 08, 2009

Speed up your Hard Drive

One way to speed up your computer is to increase your hard drive's performance. If you've been using your computer for a while, you've probably noticed that your computer is getting slower. One reason for this is that your hard drive has gotten more fragmented over time. This means that as you install and delete things from your hard drive, holes are being created and filled randomly with other files so, say, your video of Madonna might be broken up into thirty pieces all over your hard drive, slowing down its playback.

Well, Windows XP has a Disk Defragmenter that will solve all your woes. It takes the pieces of each file and puts them together again so they can be read in one clean pass. Be sure to run this program at night since it takes several hours and make sure to close any open programs. Go to Start->All Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Disk Defragmentor to access it.

Click the Analyze button. It'll tell you if you need to defragment your hard drive.

A lot of red is a bad sign. If it says "You should defragment this volume", click the Defragment button. Come back in a few hours, and your hard drive should be purring.