tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4730182871869049353.post-15642501956975197272007-09-14T08:47:00.001-04:002007-09-21T08:07:37.358-04:00<p>Every once in awhile, depending on how much you use your computer, it is always a good idea to clean temporary files from the hard drive and defragment the drive so that the OS can read the files faster.</p> <p>A disc cleanup should be done first. The reason for this is that it is kind of silly to defragment your drive and move files around that you plan on removing anyway. The cleanup process will remove temporary files from the computer and help to clear up some space. The amount of space it saves depends on many things: how long since the last disc cleanup, how much you use the computer and how you use the computer, and what you select to remove. </p> <p>To start the disc cleanup click on "Start", "Programs", "Accessories", "System Tools", and finally "Disc Cleanup". The program will immediately start scanning your drive if you have only one hard drive, otherwise you must select the drive to scan. The scan process may be very quick, or it could take several minutes. Be patient if it takes a while, as this may be the first time you have ever ran it. Future scans should be much quicker. When it is done scanning and tells me what it found, I usually select everything except "Compress old files". If you are low on disc space, buy a new drive. Compressing files makes them slower to read and the amount of space saved is not worth the performance hit. Also, keep in mind that if you have Office installed and the setup files are listed, you may NOT want to remove them. If you do remove them, any updates you receive for Office may require you to put the Office CD in the drive. It really depends on your situation. I usually leave the Office files intact. Once you select the files you want deleted click on "OK". Depending on how much you are removing, the process could take a few seconds to several minutes.</p> <p>Now that we have done a scan and cleaned up the drive a bit, let's do some spring cleaning before we defrag the drive. Open the Control Panel and click on "Add or Remove Programs". Yeah, we are going to look and see if you need everything. <strong>Ensure that you do not remove any Window's updates</strong>, but browse the list of installed software and evaluate if you really need it or not. Is there a program that you installed 6 months ago, but haven't used it since then? Remove it to clear up some drive space. Use your best judgment and remove anything you don't need or don't want.</p> <p>Finally, let's defrag the drive. The "Disc Defragmenter" option is located in the same place as the "Disc Cleaner". Launch it and choose to defragment the drive. Analyzing just tells you if you need to defrag the drive. There is no need to analyze it if you have never done this before and just removed some programs. </p> <p>What does the defrag do? It takes the data that is located on your hard drive and lines it up closely together so that it is faster to retrieve the data in the future. If data is scattered all over the drive it is more time consuming for the hard drive's read/write heads to find the data. If the data is lined up nicely (contiguous) it is much easier and faster to retrieve.</p> <p>How often you should do the cleanup and defrag really depends on you and how you use your computer. If you just browse the web and check email, you may only need to do it every month or so. Maybe longer. If you are constantly installing and uninstalling programs, playing games all the time, etc. you may need to do it weekly. Run an analysis every few days and see what it tells you. The analysis doesn't take very long and it will give you an idea of whether you need to defrag or not.</p>Shawnenoreply@blogger.com