While the CPU and RAM are the
most important factors for system performance, your hard drive plays an
important role in determining the overall speed of your computer.
That's because the hard drive comes into play when you're opening
programs or documents, when you're saving documents, or when you're
moving and copying files. It also comes into play when you are running
low on RAM by moving less-used applications to your hard drive from RAM.
So, keeping the hard drive running as near peak performance as possible
will have a positive impact on system performance.
1. Recovering wasted hard drive space
At any given time, some of the space on your hard drive is being eaten up by temporary files.
As the name implies, temporary files are not like the programs you
install or documents you save. Programs and documents are "forever," in
the sense that Windows never deletes them at random. The only time a
program is deleted is when you use Programs in Control Panel to remove
the program. Likewise, documents aren't deleted unless you intentionally
delete them and also empty the Recycle Bin.
The files in your Internet cache, also called your Temporary Internet Files
folder, are good examples of temporary files. Every time you visit a
Web page, all the text and pictures that make up that page are stored in
your Internet cache. When you use the Back or Forward button to revisit
a page you've viewed recently, your browser just pulls a copy of the
page out of the Internet cache. That saves a lot of time when compared
to how long it would take to re-download a page each time you clicked
the Back or Forward button to revisit a recently viewed page.
|
Before you click the Disk Cleanup tool, be forewarned that the process could take several minutes, maybe longer. It's never necessary to use Disk Cleanup to get rid of temporary files.
|
|
To recover some wasted disk
space, click the Disk Cleanup button on the Properties sheet for the
hard drive. Open the Computer folder, right-click a drive, and choose
Properties. In the Properties dialog box, click the Disk Cleanup button.
Disk Cleanup then analyzes the drive for expendable files.
The Files to Delete list shows categories of temporary files. When you
click a category name, the Description below the names explains the
types of files in that category. All the categories represent temporary
files that you can definitely safely delete. There won't ever be any
important programs or documents you saved on your own in the list of
temporary files.
The number to the right of
each category name indicates how much drive space the files in that
category are using, and how much space you'll gain if you delete them.
Choose which categories of files you want to delete by selecting
(checking) their check boxes. If you don't want to delete a category of
files, clear the checkmark for that category. The amount of drive space
you'll recover by deleting all the selected categories appears under the
list. After you've selected the categories of files you want to delete,
click OK. The files are deleted and the dialog box closes.
2. Deleting System Restore files and unwanted features
If you click the Clean Up
System Files button in Disk Cleanup, a More Options tab appears on the
Disk Cleanup dialog box. Clicking that tab provides two more options for
freeing up drive space:
Programs and Features: Takes you to the Programs and Features window, where you can uninstall programs and Windows Features you don't use.
System Restore and Shadow Copies:
Deletes all restore points except the most recent one. This can be
significant because system protection files are allowed to consume up to
15 percent of your available drive space.
3. Defragmenting your hard drive
When a drive is newly formatted, most of the free space on the drive is available in a contiguous chunk. This means the disk clusters
(the smallest amount of storage space that can be allocated) are
side-by-side in contiguous fashion. As Windows writes a file, it can do
so in contiguous clusters, writing the entire file in one pass. When it
reads the file back, it can also do so in one pass, making drive
performance as good as possible.
However, the more a drive is
used, the more fragmented the data becomes. Instead of writing data
contiguously, Windows writes it here and there on the drive, splitting
up the file into fragments (thus the term fragmentation).
|
Defragmentation is not necessary for solid state drives.
|
|
When that happens, the
drive head has to move around a lot to read and write files. You might
even be able to hear the drive chattering when things get really
fragmented across the drive. This puts some extra stress on the
mechanics of the drive and also slows things down a bit.
To really get things back together and running smoothly, you can defragment (or defrag
for short) the drive. When you do, Windows takes most of the files that
are split up into little chunks and brings them all together to make
them contiguous again. It also moves most files to the beginning of the
drive, where they're easiest to get to. The result is a drive that's no
longer fragmented, doesn't chatter as much, and runs faster.
Defragmenting is one of those
things you don't really have to do too often. Four or five times a year
is probably sufficient. The process could take a few minutes or up to
several hours. So, it's another one of those tasks you'll probably want
to run overnight. However, note that Windows 7, by default, defragments
the drive. You can view the current schedule, if any, in the Disk
Defragmenter program.
|
You don't have to stop using
the computer while Windows defragments the drive. You can continue to
use it as you normally would. Doing so, however, continues to generate
read/write operations on the drive, which ultimately slows down the
defragmentation process. For that reason, it's best to run the
defragmentation operation while you are not using the computer.
|
|
To defragment a hard drive, starting at the desktop:
Open your Computer folder by clicking the Start button.
Right-click the icon for your hard drive (C:), and choose Properties.
In the Properties dialog box that opens, click the Tools tab.
Click the Defragment Now button. The Disk Defragmenter program opens, as shown in Figure 1.
|
When it says you don't need to
defragment, that doesn't mean that you can't or shouldn't. It just
means the drive's not badly fragmented. But you can still defragment it.
|
|
In
the Disk Defragmenter dialog box, you're able to set up a schedule to
run the defragmenter or click the Defragment Now button. The program
will start analyzing your drive and may take as long as a few minutes or
up to a few hours.
When the defragmentation is complete, the icon on the left side of the screen should turn to a green circle with a checkmark.
Disk Defragmenter defragments
all the fragmented files and moves some frequently used files to the
beginning of the drive, where they can be accessed in the least time
with the least effort. Some files won't be moved. That's normal. If
Windows decides to leave them where they are, it's for good reason. You
may hear a lot of drive chatter as Disk Defragmenter is working. That's
because the drive head is moving things around to get everything into a
better position.
When Disk Defragmenter is finished, you can just close any open dialog boxes and the Disk Defragmenter program window.
