Defrag: Maximize the Space on Your Windows System
Deciding to get with the century and get a computer is a move more and more of our senior citizens are making. Unfortunately, they sometimes bite off more than they can chew. It becomes an ongoing struggle to simply turn the thing on and find files.
I’ve never been actually hired and paid as Technical Support, but my experiences on my own journey from computer novice to literate helps out quite a bit. Here’s a trick that makes conquering the Ghost in the Machine a victory rather than another in a long line of defeats.
Defragging
Every computer should be defragged as least once a month. If you spend as little as ten percent of your time online, you should defrag perhaps once every two weeks. Defrag is short for Defragment.
The reason it needs to be done is in the basic way your computer accesses and uses files. To take advantage of every bit of memory, the system breaks up programs into little pieces and drops them in any available space on the hard drive. The more you use certain programs, the more fragmented they can become. Defragging can make your computer run faster, programs load better and it frees up space on the hard drive.
WARNING: Before you Defrag, close down everything you have open. If you’ve never done this before, it may take awhile to complete. If you have some pressing business that involves your computer, finish it up, or get to a stopping point. Defragging is like a coffee break for your computer, and it’s rude to interrupt people on coffee break. Besides which, you could cause issues in your systems if you’re accessing files during a Defrag session. A background program like your virus scan is fine, as long as it’s not actively open and scanning.
Depending on your operating system, Disc Defragmenter is usually easy to find. For most versions of Windows from 98 up, you simply go to the START menu with the mouse and click.
You get the long list of programs loaded on the computer. Near the top of that list, you’ll see a heading called ACCESSORIES. Move the mouse up there and you’ll get another menu. In that menu, you should be able to find SYSTEM TOOLS. In System Tools, you should find Defrag.
Once you click on Defrag, you get the box that starts the program. There are several options you can tweak and set to do things a certain way, but we can discuss that once you get the basics of defragging down. I have Windows XP, so my shots all pertain to that operating system. Windows has changed a lot since 3.0, but some things remain pretty close to their roots. Defrag has two steps. The first is Analyze. It looks at your hard drive and memory and collects information on where the pieces to each program have been dropped. Then it tells you how much space is open and how much space is in use. It also tells you how fragmented the hard drive is and how much space you’ll recover once the job is complete. Now, it’s time to defrag. Just click the button and away you go.
You can sit there and watch it put the pieces back together or go do something else. You can also have it minimize to the toolbar so it’s not cluttering the screen.
Once Defrag is done, you’re good to go. Remember to Defrag more often if your time online increases.
