"Here, Kitty-Kitty!" -- Easy PC Maintenance

I promise -- this will be the only entry I post this week  that contains any useful information. The rest will be as useless as I can possibly make them. 

Okay everyone, hold onto something.  I am about to go full-tilt nerd....

How do you know if you need to run Microsoft Defrag? The primary symptom is that you have begun to refer to your computer as, "That twenty-pound paperweight on my desk."  (Or, five pounds, if it's your laptop.) You say this because the Internet runs slowly and just about everything else does too. When you click a Desktop icon, sometime later you click it again just to make sure the first one took. Nothing actually "runs"; it all crawls.

Who is immune? No one with a PC. The hard drive can still fragment even if your computer is so beefy that beside the Intel Inside logo shines a "Nearly NASA Awesome" sticker. You are in no way protected even if your liquid-cooled, artificially intelligent, super desktop gaming monster is so proactive that when you get close to a speaker, it says, "Good morning, Dave." You've always wondered who Dave is, but that's okay. It says the same thing to the cat.

Regardless, the idea is that all hard drives eventually fragment.

How Did This Fragging Thing Happen?

Okay, let me qualify that last statement a bit. If your hard drive is just sitting around, unused, it is not going to fragment spontaneously. Dave, I have a surprise for you! Fragmentation happens over time as old files are deleted and new ones saved. A deleted file is not really gone. Well, at first, anyway. The computer marks the file so that it later knows the space is available as if it were empty. It's almost like a sticky note to itself that says, "If I erase this part and put something new in its place, there is very little chance my owner will take me to the nearest bridge and say, 'So, thought you would lose the first sixteen chapters of my novel, did you?'"

However, the new file might not fit into the old space, so the leftover bits get merrily chucked into the next available one. Who cares which one! Organization is far more important to humans than to computers. The time necessary to shovel through all those gigabytes of hard drive real estate is what slows things down and makes you want to replace your "Nearly NASA Awesome" sticker with "Beyond this point there be turtles."

Defrag De PC

A defrag is not something you want to do every day. It stresses the hard drive, shortens its life, and encourages your friends to start sending you links to addiction therapy websites. Then again, excessive fragmentation also stresses the drive. The good news is that Windows can analyze it for you and suggest whether the procedure is necessary.

Note that, depending on the size of the drive, analyzing and defragging can be a slow process. Of course, a slow computer is sort of the whole point, so you're probably used to it by now.

Running a defrag is relatively easy. On an XP box you click Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter. On Vista/Windows 7, type "Disk Defragmenter" into the search box under the Start button menu. Once Windows offers you a list of its best guesses, right-click Disk Defragmenter and choose Run As Administrator from the menu.

Done Defragging

Okay, what just happened and why do I feel like I need to bench press something to bring down my nerd levels?  Defragmenting causes file parts that belong together to move as close as possible to each other, which minimizes the time and effort the computer needs to look for them. The computer can find all the parts faster, so as a result the system runs faster. Or in other words, like separating laundry, your World of Warcraft Death Knight data is no longer mixed in with your Lady Gaga MP3s and the first sixteen chapters of your post-apocalyptic novel about a seven-foot, two-inch tall zombie named Bubbles.

Note that not all files can be moved.  (Zombies are irritable.)

Defrag's done and you've rebooted. Clicked icons respond in less time than it would take a turtle to walk across your office floor and develop rudimentary language skills. Generally, the system runs like it did when it was new.

But what if it doesn't? Many other things can slow down a computer besides a fragmented hard drive. Viruses and spyware can consume system resources. Too many programs in the Startup folder can do the same thing. Even the hardware, such as RAM or the hard drive itself, could be outdated and unable to keep up with the demands of modern software.

So, okay, defragmenting doesn't fix everything. The computer has stopped calling the cat "Dave" and now refers to him as "Gloria." But at least it does it faster now.