Why you should defragment a hard drive
When you defragment a hard drive there are many issues that must be taken into consideration. Perhaps it is best to find out why defragmenting hard drives is needed in the first place. The main problem is that over time the data on your hard drive is beginning to occur in a lot of strange, very dispersed places. This happens typically to small files, so in the end your hard drive will end up having one small file split apart in a dozen or so different places. Obviously this translates in a longer access time when you attempt to use such a file. Ideally that file should be held in one place alone and that is exactly what the defrag utility does. Now why does the fragmenting phenomenon occurs in the first place. The most important reason is the swap file. Windows and *nix operating systems alike use a small part of your hard drive when the RAM memory is not enough. The usage of this space tends to be rather chaotic though especially in the Windows operating systems, thus when you attempt to write a file to disk (while saving or installing) the computer will have a very hard time in finding a contiguous space in which to store that specific file, so it splits the file apart and puts in many different locations. Now the best way to avoid hard disk fragmenting is to put that swap file in a separate partition, *nix operating systems do this by default, Windows operating systems on the other hand are more hard to convince, not impossible though. So the first thing you must do is to create a small partition of let's say around 1 or 2 gigabytes (this size is not standard it can very well be smaller at around 300 megabytes) and work your way through the advanced options there to set up the partition on which you want your swap file to be stored. In Windows 98 you must simply right click My Computer, go to the Performance tab, go to Virtual Memory and set it from there, nothing too complex, it might also be a very good idea to give the swap file a fixed size. As a word of warning you should place the location of your swap file on your fastest drive available. Of course you might choose to disable it altogether, but make sure that you have enough RAM otherwise you will be in trouble. Now if you want to check for the alternatives to defragment a hard drive check the next chapter.
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