Defragmentation

     Today's computer users aren't just storing Word documents, Excel spreadsheets or Powerpoint presetnations on their hard drive.  They're storing photos, music and videos.  While the size of Microsoft Office files are small, photos, music and videos can be quite large, depending on the type of files they are.  A future Tech Tip will deal with the differece in file types and their sizes, but today's Tech Tip deals with what to do if you add and delete these types of files on a regular basis.

     If you save files like this to your hard drive, then move them to a jump drive, ipod, mp3 player or other type of device to take them with you, the put then back on your hard drive for storage purposes, There's a chance that your hard drive isn't saving the digital information from these files in a contiguous manner.  In other words, the hard drive doesn't save the file in one place.  Rather, it might store a bit of the file here, another bit there, and basically scatter pieces of the file all over the drive wherever there's room.  When you select the file, RAM gathers up all those bits (and you wondered why digital information is called bits), and then the file can be played or displayed or your monitor or screen.

     If you delete one of the these files, doing so creates spaces where other bits of information from other files can be stored.  Do this over and over again and...well, you can see that eventually, a lot of your files can be scattered all over your hard drive.  The more the files are scattered, the longer it may take to pull those files together.  Consequently, your computer may run slower the more you add and delete larger files like this.

     At least once a month, you should defragment your hard drive in order to put all those pieces of all those files together and help your computer to run faster.  While you can buy a program to do this, the Windows operating system has a defragmentation utility built in to it.  If you have a "My Computer" icon, right click it, choose "manage," then double-click "Disk Defragmenter."  If you can't see, it might be part of the "Storage" file.  If there is a "+" next to "Storage," double-click "Storage" to reveal the sub-menu and reveal the program.