Defrag...how? why?
 

why would i want to defrag my HD and how do i do it if i decide it needs to be defragged. thanks!

Defragging your hard drive, in it's most basic form, moves the informaion around on your hard drive to optomize the amount of free space you have.

As to how you do it, what operating system are you running?

Run the defrag application and see how fragmented your files are, if you think it's too much then defrag!

defragging makes your HD faster. Normally, files get split up into small sections across the hard disc (fragments), and when the HD wants to read them it ends up skipping across the whole disc to reconstruct the file. Defragmenting puts all of these fragments together, allowing the disc to read the file without having to move the read-head so far - thus speeding things up.

I'd recommend you do it fairly regularly (a fully-fragged disc takes ages to defragment); esp on your system drive where the difference will really be noticeable.

sorry, XP and thanks for the responses so far!!!

dont defrag every day tho, it really pushes you drives read/write capability to the edge non stop for longer periods of time than ususl. this will slowly wear it out and make it create more errors

ok, i am defragging and it has been 15 minutes and it is still only 1% complete. HOW LONG!?!??!?! DAYS?????

you should shut down all programs that write to to drive before you defrag. even doing this, defragging can take a long time.

Think of each file on your disk as a stack of papers. However the papers aren't all together, but all over your hard disk. So when a particular file is accessed, it might get one part of it (e.g.one page of the paper) at the start of the hdd, and 3 parts in the middle... and another 1 a bit after that..so as you can see file access could be faster if the pages were all together.
Defragging, gets the fragments of the file and puts them all together consecutively as best as it can. So things will be faster. It also helps reduce fragmentation occuring.
When you're defragging, close all other programs, and dont touch your computer, then it'll do it as fast as it can.

Defragging has always taken forever for windows, not sure why. But regardless the bigger your drive and the more fragmented it is the longer it will take.

Download a program called perfectdisk. www.perfectdisk.com this is a great defragmentation program. This does both on-line and offline defragmentation as well as defragmentation of the mbr, fat and the swap-file.

-SF

diskeeper and O&O defrag are popular too

i use diskeeper pro, great little program, i have it on all 4 of my computers

how large is that drive you are working on now?

if you havent defragged in a long time or ever, itll take a long time since itll be all over the place, also if you have 15% or less disk space available itll slow it right down

thanks for all the help!!!

you only need to defrag about once every year or 6months, due to it wearing out drives and stuff and most computers are set up and not a lot of things are installed and uninstalled so they dont get fragmented.

i usually end up formatting a few times a year when my disk gets to cluttered, so havent used defrag since win95

depends. such a generalisation shouldn't be made, imo.

really? curious about this...proof, please.

another unnecessary generalisation. Totally depends on the user.

yeah, i do the same, i like to keep a fairly 'fresh' system.

anyways...

defragging is somewhat personal, depending on how you use your computer.

me? i defrag ~weekly with diskeeper 8. more or less, depending on how many files i've been shuffling around and such.

timewise, my best suggestion is to have the freespace for the defragger to be able to do it more efficiently. +30% is good, imo.

I defrag once a month. It keeps things in good running order. I also, like SiN, reformat several times a year when things get so bad that a defrag just wont cut it anymore.

Best way:
Use "Ctrl+Alt+Delete" (Task Manager) and close all programs/tasks/processes except systray and Explorer. Disable ANY screensaver and/or power management you may have on (sleep, hibernate, etc. after "x" amount of hours). Start defragment, turn monitor off, and go to sleep.

I just go into Safe mode in Windows, and run it from there. It's easier then Ctrl-Alt-Del a bunch of times, and makes sure everything is shut off.

WinXp deframenter is near useless I've found. Or atleast doesn't do as good of a job as I like. Get a program called Diskeeper. Its an excellent program and I've used over and over. You can also use it remotely. I've used this over the stock defragmenter that's included with WinXP and this program always does a better job.