>From an article I clipped from the newspaper last year...
It's pretty basic, but for those of you like myself, I hope it is
helpful...
Do your hard drive a favour today. Defrag it.
The term 'defrag' is short for defragment, a nerd word for
cleaning up
your hard drive.
Just as you need routine car maintenance, you need to
periodically
re-arrange bits of data on your hard drive so they are lined up in
orderly fashion. If you dont, your hard drive will slow down.
Hard drives are divided into thousands of little blocks called
sectors.
When you store a file or load a program onto the hard drive, it lays the
data down into the empty sectors in a circular line similar to the
grooves in a phonograph record.
When you delete something, the hard drive does not erase all the
data
associated with that file. It simply erases a tiny bit of each sector -
called the address - that identifies which file the data goes on.
If the sector has a vacant address, the hard drive 'sees' it as
empty
and will drop in the new data when the need arises. That data replaces
the old data.
The more you use your hard drive, the more often it starts
putting data
all over the place. Instead of being arranged in long continuous
grooves, your data starts to resemble a checkerboard. Your hard drive
becomes fragmented, and has to work harder to pull up the data.
Windows 95: Click on the start button in your task bar. Go to
Programs/Accessories/Systems Tools. Click on Disk Defragmenter. Then
follow the on-screen instructions. The program then runs itself.
Window 3.1: Exit windows, and go to the C: prompt. Type 'defrag' and
that will launch the self-running program. (Note: some early versions of
the Windows operating system don't have a defrag program. If that's the
case, ask around at software stores for a 'disk utility' program.
Macintosh users have to buy a separate program to defrag their hard
drives. Most Mac users use a software called Norton Utilities.
While you're at it, you probably ought to run ScanDisk, another
disk-maintenance program.
Windows 95: Scandisk is in the same folder as Disk Defragmenter.
Windows 3.1: Type 'scandisk' at the C: prompt.
If you use your computer a lot, cleaning up your hard drive
probably
should be done once a month. Otherwise, every three months should be
enough.
Judith Richards
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