Defragging

[Rose]

What is it and how do I do it?

[bradclark1]

Start/All Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Disk Defragmenter

To put it simply; When you remove, move, uninstall, etc it leaves spaces, bits and pieces of files here and there on your hard drive (fragmenting). With all that fragmentatin it takes micro-seconds longer for your computer to look or search for files.
Defragmenting pulls all files and spaces together moving/removing/cleaning up wasted space.
I do it every three or four months but really can't say I ever noticed any improvement in XP but then systems are a lot more powerful. There was noticeable improvement in 98.

[lesrae]

I use a little program called 'contig' to defrag, it's a little less user-friendly than the Windows version, but IMO it's better and faster. Download it from here: http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Contig.html and then extract the contig.exe file and save it to your c:\windows or c:\winnt direcory. Then at the command prompt you type:

contig c:\*.* -s [Return]

To defragment your c:\ drive, changing the drive letter to do other drives. I use it at home and at work and I'm convinced it's better - I've used various tools to analyse fragmentation before and after using it and they all report that it's done it's job.

The other sysinternals app I use is pagedfrg which does a defragment of your system files during the boot sequence, ie registry files, page fil etc.

[Rose]

K, thanks guys.