Improve Windows XP Performance: Defragment Hard Drive
A good way to improve the performance of Windows XP is to defragment the hard drive every few months. The more copying, deleting, and other file related tasks you do, the more fragmented your hard disk will become.
Before you leave for lunch or some other extended period away from the keyboard, perform the following steps. Yes, you can continue to use the computer while defrag is running but performance will be sluggish and defrag will not be able to do the best job.
- Close all the applications that you can. The less applications running, the better job defrag will do.
- Click Start.
- Click Run.
- In the Open textbox type defrag c:.
- Click OK.
A cmd.exe, “command”, window will open on screen showing the progress of defrag. Leave it and go to lunch! The window will close when the defrag is complete. Also, if you have never defragmented the hard drive before, it could take an hour or more to complete. If you do a defrag every few months or so, the process will be much faster.
A Wikipedia article describing defragmentation: here.
Here is an alternative method of defragmenting your Windows XP hard disk: How to Defragment Your Disk Drive Volumes in Windows XP
Filed under: Microsoft, Windows, Windows XP, productivity, software, technology
There are endless debates on whether fragmentation affects performance or not, from personal experience i have found its safer to keep the seemingly harmless disease under safe limits in order to avoid the drive getting ‘exhausted’ or worn out faster. On heavily used systems, it makes a huge difference in response and smoothness.