How To Make Your Hard Disk Drive Go Faster Tutorial on how to increase the speed of your hard disk drive

[lawmatchmaker 0]

If you are running on windows,first quit all applications. Deactivate antivirus utilities, screen savers and other programs running in the background. To ensure you've quit all programs in Windows ,Ctrl+Alt+Delete once not twice or you will shut your computer down. You will be shown list of applications running. Highlight each application one by one and click on End Task to close them one at a time. You should than click twice on My Computer to open the My Computer window. You should than choose the hard disk that you want to defragment,go to Properties in the shortcut File menu. You should see the Properties window for the drive that you selected. Click the Tools tab and than click the Defragment Now button. AS for Macs, they don't usually supply the disk-defragmentation program with Mac OS, but 3rd party utilities will include 1.Regular defragmentation of the hard disk will ensure that your hard disk operates efficiently.

[Hadi 0]

These are surely very important stuff that each user of the computer must know even before using it, so I suppose that everyone know these valuable information, you can also add that doing a scan for each hard drive is a very important thing to do from time to time, because it fixes errors: you can do that by going to My computer and then right click your hard drive icon e.g C:/ or D:/ click properties/ tools/Checknow then a window will popup, so check the two squares so that the computer fixes the errors. And click start, the scan will probably start after you reboot your computer.

[lawmatchmaker 0]

I agree with you Hadi, many times we take for granted that our computer will function smoothly and panic when something goes wrong,when sparing just a few minutes each day doing mantainance will save us alot of trouble. Also, quite often alot of people are not aware of the many utilities included in the Windows Operating System that help mantain the computer eg disk defrag,system restore etc. I suggest we all spare some free time to explore these functions as you never know when they will come up handy. They are usually located at Start--->Accessories--->System Tools.

Edited June 10, 2006 by lawmatchmaker (see edit history)

[BooZker 0]

hmm cool. I will have to try this out. How long does it take? If i have 2 internal drives C:/ drive with programs and things on it and a D:/ with just windows and other system software should i do it to both or just one of the two?

[lawmatchmaker 0]

How long a defrag takes depends on how big your hard drives are, how corrupted your hard drives are,how fast your computer is among other factors. If this is the first defrag of your harddrive since a very long time, it could take quite awhile maybe even up to a whole day, so I suggest you just run the defrag programme in the background and do other things. Fortunately, after your first defrag and if you defrag regularly say once a week, the whole process takes a much shorter time and you will notice the difference in performance too.

[mahesh2k 0]

Hey that was good tutorial.I will try this.Hey do you ahve any methods to keep life of floppy longer than actual.That is it gets bad sectors after 2 or three uses.what to do?

[lawmatchmaker 0]

Hey that was good tutorial.I will try this.Hey do you ahve any methods to keep life of floppy longer than actual.That is it gets bad sectors after 2 or three uses.what to do?

Usually, formatting the floopy should help, but remember its just a thin piece of plastic so store it in its casing until you need to use it, and keep it dry to prevent fungus growth. If data is really important should burn it into cd instead, luckily floopy is inexpensive so replacing it is a good option, but remember to back up the data somewhere else before the floopy goes bad.

[Hadi 0]

I heard of some floppy cleaner thing, it's a product you can buy that contains a floppy with microscopic brushes. So you put this floppy into your floppy reader and it automatically clean it. And also there is some sort of a lquid that you can put on the length of the floppy, and it repairs it. That's what the guy in the store told me but I never tried it so don't blame me if something went wrong. You can find these in any compter parts shop. It's also available for CDs

[michaelper22 0]

I've tried defragmenting my hard drive in he past, and there were no noticable speed increases. Ever since, I have given up on defragging (although that was in the days of Windows 98, things may have changed in XP). As far as defragging floppies, there is no point, especially since floppies are almost extinct (I would have to pay for it if I wanted a floppy drive in my machine).

[Avalon 1]

I didn't think defragging hard drives was that important these days with the high speed hard drives available. However, given the size of these drives, defragging might be a good idea. I suspect however that if you have a large hard drive, (greater than 100gb) that has a lot of data on it, it will take quite a while to defrag. Nonetheless, I might give it a try and see if it speeds things up a bit. Some of my programs are taking a while to load, notably Photoshop.Floppies are indeed almost extinct, so much so that floppy drives are an optional extra on most new computers. If you must use a floppy disk, make sure it's nothing important as they are very prone to failure. Even if you put something on a brand new floppy as a backup and put it away some place safe in case you need it later, I have many times when the floppy has failed on me. Far better to backup to a CD or for temporary data transfer, use a memory stick of some sort. I don't trust floppy disks as far as I can throw them. Actually, that could be a long way. I just don't trust them and no longer use them.

[T100 0]

The default defragmentation application that comes with the windows OS is not as good as other commercial one. It also requires that you have quite a lot of spare space before you can defragment your hard disk. Also, the result of defragmentation is not always good. Defragmentation may improve performance slightly in c: drive, but not very significant in other drives. Most of the time, the deterioration of performance is caused by hardware getting old. A SMART test generally helps to determine the state of the hard disk.

[Gondero Werkus 0]

I've found after a lot of installing and uninstalling Defraging a hard drive will speed up thing very much, mostly in opening and running applications.Although some games such as Guild Wars make a lot of fragmented files on your drive because of they update the game data. I would like to know if anyone knows of third party defragers for Windows because I've realized the one supplied with the Windows OS does a good job but could do better but doesn't.

[Hadi 0]

I know a programm you can buy called tuneup utilities I used it and it does what it says: Removing Junk data from hard drives, scanning your hard drive for errors and corrupted sectors, defraging your registry and cleaning it to, optimize your computer with a mini program called one click maintenance, it is highly recommanded to use this mini program, and it has also lots of other features. You could try finding the site by googling. It is available in a free trial version. Before using it my computer was crashing very often, and from time to time error messages were popping every where. But now I have not a single error all games are working great and with great speed. That is no advertising for this software but really it is the best software you can find out there for maitaining your computer. I had my computer from 3 years and it is working just fine with not a single problem thanks to this program. There is also another software called fast defrag and it also defrag your hard drives, it is also great using it. You can find by googling I guess it is free don't remember anymore.

Edited June 12, 2006 by Hadi (see edit history)

[FirefoxRocks 0]

Good tutorial for computer beginners. Most computer users should know this after a few months or years of computer usage. In fact, I found it on the first day I got the first computer. Windows 98 prompted me to run the Maintenance Wizard, which guided me through Disk CleanUp/Disk Defragmenter.I do this about once every two weeks.

[Tetraca 0]

Do you know why there is no defraggers for Mac OS X, and Linux/BSD? There simply is no need for one. Files are automatically defragged without you noticeing it.