How to Optimize The Performance on Your PC
Windows has built-in utilities which can help you keep your PC running efficiently. One of those is a utility called Disk Defrag.Disk Defragmenter? What does that even mean? And why should you be using this particular utility?
First, before I explain what disk defragging is, it will be helpful to understand how disk drives work, and then you can more easily understand why a utility like defrag is important.
As you use your PC, files are created on the hard drive. Rarely is there a contiguous space for those files to be written in. The operating system looks for any available space to write your new files to. It uses a system of file pointers to map out all the sectors of each file. Often a new file may be spread between numerous smaller areas or fragments of free space when being written, this causes the hard drive read heads to have to move all over the drive area to find the parts of your file.
Imagine taking all the pages out of a book and spreading them randomly all over your house and then trying to read the book. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to put those pages back together in order? Disk Defragmenter is a program that keeps the data on your PCs Hard Drive grouped together and in proper order.
Windows 10, like Windows 8 and Windows 7 before it, is supposedly set up to automatically defragment files for you once a week. This does not always happen, so if you notice your files are taking longer to load it pays to run the disk defragment utility on your own. In fact, as a preventative measure, the techs at Unified Technology Solutions recommend that on average you will want to run the Disk Defragmenter every month minimum.
If you with digital photos, music, videos editing or large databases, some users may require it more often. For those who regularly work with large files, there is software available for purchase that will continually monitor and defrag your drives.
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