wht is defrag?

Basically, to increase the PCs speed during files retreival. Imagine you have a filing cabinet with many folders and papers. One day, that cabinet falls over, accidently opens, and all the pages scatter and get mixed together. You then go through the pages and place everything back in its proper location. If you did not do this, it would take a long time to find something when you need it fast. What you have just done is 'Defrag'ed' your filing cabinet. Thats what the PC does to the hard drive when you DeFrag. It puts all the data back in its proper order so it takes less time to find something.

hmmm such technical sounding answers... here it is in layman's terms... say you go to download a song or a file... when the song/file is downloaded.. the whole song/file isn't always placed together on the hard drive.. it may be placed in totally different sections of it.. When this happens, it takes longer for you computer to retrieve these files/song because it has to search for all the "pieces" of it on your hard drive.. As the name implies, defragmenting is doing just that. it is taking the 'fragmented" file,song, whatever and placing them together or at least the same area of the hard drive. Your machine will run a bit faster if you do defrag on a regular basis so you may want to go into your scheduled task and set up a defrag to be done every few weeks

defrag is a program on your computer that just takes the data on your hard drive and puts it in a different spot so that you can access is faster. it does not hurt or make any thing stop working. if i was you i would do this to your PC. it helps make a bit faster but can take along time to defrag a computer so make sure you have time or leave your computer on.

Hope this answers your question.

When data is written to a hard drive It written from inside of a platter to outside of a platter continously.

As data is changed, erased or anything else that would cause your drive th have writes to it, it tries to write data continously. But since data already exist on the drive it can only write so much in a continous location and then it has to move to the next location and so on until the data is completely written. This is called fragmenting a hard drive and can creat overhead on allocation tables.

Defrag or defragmentation is a process of moving data on your hard drive so that files can have a continous location. All files can't be moved and some files can not be defraged.

One important thing to keep in mind is your block size. A block size is the maximum size of data that can fit in one block.

For instance if you have a 33Kb file and a 32 Kb block size then it will fill the first block with 32 Kb and the second block with 1 Kb to make a total of 33 Kb. Now once data is written to the second block no other data can be written there so your 33 KB size file in the example will take 64Kb of space on your drive.

This can be seen when you look at the "Size" and "Size on Disk" from the file properties. This is called wasted space, in the example above you have 31 KB of wasted space. 33Kb for the file and it takes 2 32KB blocks so 64 KB the size of the 2 blocks minus 33 Kb the size of the file leave you with 31 Kb of wasted space for the file.

While creating smaller block sizes can save on wasted space it increases you Allocation table size.

Defrag puts files back together in the right place on yoru drive when windows scatters them about. When your system is defragged it runs more efficiently

If it's XP

Start->Programs->Sys Tools->Disk Defragment.

Select a drive and defragment

Hi

To improve the computer speed. defrag. will upkeep your hard disk data

The files are re-allocated within the HDD so they can be accessed at a optimal rate improving speed and efficiency.

It's sorting out the files in the PC. kinda like when a secretary sorts out the impt files and gives it to the manager when he needs them.

In short....It just readjust's the sectors on ur hard drive.Making programs which u use frequently and ur pc as a whole , a bit more faster.

Thanks,

Colin.