Defragmenting your disk drive is an important element of computer maintenance, and should be performed on a regular basis to ensure not only the smooth error free operation of your computer system, but also as a means to protect the actual life span of your hard drive.

How Your Hard Drive Becomes Fragmented
When you buy a new PC, your hard drive is at its most efficient — mainly because it's pretty empty. It will generally have the operating system installed and a few utility programs, but not much else. After that, it's all down hill as you install and uninstall programs, add, amend and delete data. The problem is that data is written in a way that makes the best use of disk space but that is definitely not the best when reading that data.

When writing data to the hard drive, the computer's operating system puts it into the first available space it finds. With a new disk, this is no problem because the whole file fits into the available space. However, when you delete a file, the operating system doesn't physically clear it from the disk, it just marks the space as unused.   When another file is written, it is put into this space, even if it won't fit. If it is too big, only part of the file is written into the available space and the rest goes into the next free area, with a link between the two parts. The result is a fragmented file.

By using a quality defragmenting application, your hard drive will have all of its files re-organized which will lead to much greater stability and speed of operation as well as will greatly increase the life spand of your hard drive.  I recommend performing a complete system defrag at least once every 30 days to keep your hard drive in tip top shape.  

My Pick for the best Disk Defrag Software

I use a program called Advanced Defrag which is a simple but powerful tool that can be downloaded free from their website.   A full function trial version is available for free  so you can give it a try. Once you've installed and run it, disk access will be back to top speed.  Programs will load faster, reading data will be quicker and the whole system will become much more responsive. The only thing you need to do then is to schedule Advanced Defragmenter to run regularly so that your hard disk is kept up to speed.