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Understand the ins and outs of defragmenting your PC with expert advice from Telecable
Murcia and Alicante’s leading communications company explains how to optimise your computer
Over time, our computers often become sluggish and slow, turning routine screen time into a chore. This is often due to an overloaded and disorganised hard drive, where all of our files are stored. Most operating systems break our data down into small fragments when there’s not enough space to store an entire file in one place.
The amount of fragmented data spread across a hard drive during the life of a computer can grow alarmingly high and the more fragments, the harder it is for your operating system to find them, thus slowing down the system.
Defragmentation, or defragging as it’s more commonly known, essentially reverses this process, Telecable experts explain, consolidating the pieces of your files and organising your hard disk storage.
To better understand the defragmentation of files, just imagine an empty room which we must fill with boxes of different sizes. Instead of organising the boxes, we simply place them anywhere there’s space. As we add more boxes, we notice that there are empty spaces and that the boxes are all over the room.
This disorder is similar to the fragmentation of the files on a hard drive, where the files are divided into fragments and free spaces are assigned, which results in a disordered location and makes it more difficult for the operating system to access the files.
The benefits of defragging
Defragmenting your hard drive will considerably improve the performance of your PC, since it allows the operating system to access complete files and folders more quickly. Every time you edit or delete a file, it will likely end up scattered and disordered, which then slows down the reading and writing of these files.
When a hard disk is defragmented, the process reformats your drive, putting all of the pieces back together so that they can be found rapidly. This will greatly improve the response time of the system, resulting in a more fluid user experience.
How often should you defrag your computer?
Hard drives are designed to have a long lifespan and to be able to support big workloads; however, how often you need to defrag your own machine will depend on a number of factors, such as the number of changes and updates carried out on stored files.
In general though, modern hard disks have better file storage and management capabilities, which may reduce the need to frequently defragment these.
Most Windows operating systems defrag the hard drive automatically on a regular basis, but if your computer is in constant use then it never has a chance to do this. Still, a scheduled defragmentation is a good way to keep your machine optimised, and you can always run the process yourself if you notice your PC becoming sluggish.
While there’s no set time period for defragging, it’s a good idea to carry out this maintenance task on your hard drive every couple of months or so to keep your computer healthy and running smoothly. However, if your machine sees daily use, the defragging could be upped to as often as every 15 days or so.
The experts at Telecable understand the importance of computers for both work and leisure, and a range of tips and information for your devices can be found on the Telecable website.
Image: Freepik
