Defrag Hard Drive - The Alternatives
So you want to check the alternatives on how to defrag a hard drive. The obvious solution is to simply open a My Computer instance right click the hard drive you want to defrag, go to the Tools tab and select the defrag option from there. Of course that occasionally you might want to defrag more than one partition at a time, so if you wish to do this simply go to Start> Programs> Accessories> System Tools and select the Disk Defragmenter and than choose the All Hard Drives option. This might all seem fine and dandy, but there are a few problems you might encounter when you defrag a hard drive. The most obnoxious one can be found in Windows XP. You see this jewel of operating system won't allow to defrag your partitions unless you have a minimal amount of free space available. Now this is plain dumb, because when your hard drive is getting full the fragmenting is the most obvious. Fortunately there are alternatives and by this I mean third party software. Norton Utilities is the best for this purpose because you see it is simply better. Why you may ask. The algorithms involved are simply better. The main purpose of defragmenting a hard drive is to make your computer act faster. Usually this is done by putting all the files in a contiguous zone and also by moving the often used files in the fastest areas of your hard drive. At least this is how the theory goes. Norton Utilities' defrag option does something more. It takes into account that once you use a file it is very likely that you will use other files from the same folder, so the program clusters together files from the same folder. This seems rather logical now doesn't it? But still Norton Defrag utility is the only one doing this. Of course there is the added advantage that you can defrag your partition no matter how much free space you have on it. One word of warning though: it will go faster if you have a large chunk of free space. Another interesting approach to defragmenting is to make the process real time. By this I mean that there are programs that will actively monitor your hard drive and defrag it accordingly anytime it sees fit. There is something wrong with this approach though. You see there is indeed a slowing in your computer when some really bad fragmenting occurs, but even then it's not very visible. The problem with resident programs is though that they tend to eat up a lot of memory, so there is really no reason to use such program. A defrag every two weeks should be more than enough. Also it is good to defrag hard drives as soon as you install the operating system. Combining these two methods: reducing fragmentation by smart use and defragmenting hard drives when it is necessary using the right tools you can safely assume that from this point of view your troubles are over. And I mean that.
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