Low performance? defrag?

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Can someone explain why is it usefull to defrag the conputer? I am having low performance lately...should this help? how do I do that
Thanks
Francesca
 
A defrag will help to an extent with speeding up programs launching and file access time, it doesn't do much for serious proformance drag however.

The point of a defrag is to optimize the way data is stored on disk. Normally when writing data to disk the information is fit into whatever space is currently not occupied. So if a file gets deleted the place it was on disk is available and a part of another file will eventually just be filled into the gap it was in. If the gap is not big enough to hold the entire file then just a portion of that data goes in that gap and the other is written somewhere else. This is file fragmentation, when data gets divided up over a large physical portion of the disk it takes longer to read that data. Defragmentation just reorganizes the data in continous blocks on the physical disk to speed up reads and writes

Most common cause I see of slow system proformance tends to be background applications and services that aren't used.
 
Francesca said:
Hi
Can someone explain why is it usefull to defrag the conputer? I am
having low performance lately...should this help? how do I do that?
Thanks!
Francesca
Click to expand...

Low performance could be due to a number of things. In particular a friend
of mine reported a major slowdown over a few weeks, and it turned out that
he had a lot of adware programs on his system.

However, fragmentation will cause a significant slow down. This is because a
file may become scattered across your hard drive, so that it may take five
or six (or even several hundred) disk head movements to collect all the
bits. So it's worth trying defragmenting first. To do this click on start,
then programs then accessories then system tools. You should see disk
defragmenter listed. Run it.

If you still have problems, you could try downloading adaware (free) to
check for unwanted adware.

Good luck,

John.
 
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