Speed Up Your Computer

Everybody knows this story. You got your shiny new computer and loved how fast it moved. Time passes, and it's not so exciting and new anymore, and it is super slow. Several factors can contribute to this. One of the problems is fragmentation of the hard drive. Your hard drive stores data on a round disk inside its container (picture a small CD and you're close). It starts off with all of that data centrally located around the inside of this disk where it is quickly accessed. Over time, more files get written to the disk, and some are deleted. As files get added and removed, they are scattered all over the disk, making it harder (and therefore slower) for the computer to pull those files out when needed.

To correct this problem, you need a Defragmentation program which is used to "defrag" your computer. Microsoft included a simple defragger but it is very slow. A much faster defragger has been created by Auslogics. It does in minutes what the Microsoft version takes hours to do and it is also free. You can find it at http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/download/. They have some other products on their website, but several of those do have a cost attached.

Now that you've downloaded and installed it, it is very simple to run. Just open it up and the click defrag button on the first screen. There is a chart on the middle right that explains what each colored square means. The graph in the middle is set so that the inner portion of the disk is toward the top and the outer portion is at the bottom. As it runs, you'll see it moving squares up to represent the files moving to the center of the drive.

There are a few options in the Settings menu that can help you tweak the performance, and also schedule the defrag to run automatically periodically.

Auslogics Disk Defrag is a straight forward program to help speed up your computer, but it is not the only answer. Stay tuned to InfoStream's Blog for more ideas and tips on keeping your computer in top shape.