just an asterisk

Has anyone ever asked you if you’ve defragged your hard-drive?  Ever wondered what the heck that means?  People often refer to this mystical process as something “you should do” or as the cure all for a slow computer.  The truth – it’s useful and important, but like the magic bullet of any get rich/healthy/smart quick scheme, on it’s own, it’s just a tool.

What you need to know:

The analogy that I use to picture defragging is putting groceries away.  Your fridge (a hard-drive) is only so big.  When you get back from Costco with 20 bags of mixed groceries, you probably sort out all your purchases and put like things near each other in the fridge.  You do this sorting first and it takes extra time.  It would be whole lot faster just to empty bags onto the counter and cram them in wherever there is space.

When you save something to your hard-drive, it’s composed of many smaller segments.  Hard-drives are brilliant at keeping track of those segments so in the interest of speed, your drive throws stuff in the empty areas.  A little bit here, a little there and poof! the file is stored with a nice and short write time.   It’s a lot like the fridge analogy if you don’t take the time to sort things out first.

Now try to find the baked beans.

When your computer goes looking for a file, it knows where to look (unlike you searching for that hidden jar of mustard) but the read time increases dramatically as the drive moves around gathering the pieces.  You can make cooking faster by putting the mustard and ketchup on the same shelf and you can make your computer’s read time faster by keeping file segments together.

To defrag or defragging is short for defragmentation, which is exactly what is sounds like.  Take the pieces and put them together.  Move the condiments to the same shelf, keep the meet together… you get the idea.

In a way, we’re trying to get the best of both worlds: when we put stuff onto our hard-drive, we want to go as fast as possible, throwing food in the fridge with fastballs from the other side of the kitchen.  Then, when the dust has settled and we’ve gone to bed, we want our maid (the defrag program) to organize everything.

Keep it on schedule: The right X at the right X…

When I used to work in Retail, we often said we wanted the right product, at the right store, at the right price, at the right time.  In our case, to make that happen, we’ll schedule the defragger to run while we sleep and when we wake up the magic will be complete.  Your computer needs to be on for this…

Here are the instructions for doing this on Windows XP:

XP Instructions

In Windows 7 just open up the disk defrag program (normally in Start -> All Programs –> Accessories->System Tools

Click on the “configure schedule” button and set the time and frequency.

That’s it for now, but let me know if you have any questions in the comments!

~ab

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 24th, 2010 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Cocktail Party Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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