Excellent question! Thank you for asking, I’ll explain in simple terms why you need to do this to your computer about every fortnight and the cause fragmentation has on your computers performance.
Why Your Computer Is Not Smart
I’ll start with a comment about computers in general. Let’s dispel the notation that they are smart, because obviously they are not, The need to defragment them is just one of the reasons out of many as to why computers are in fact quite silly.
Your computers hard drive isn’t very smart either, What happens when you save a document you’ve been working on? Well your computer saves the file on the hard drive for you to load up later on of course, pretty simple stuff, Now here’s the funny part! It doesn’t save the entire file in the one place for fast retrieval later.
That makes little sense right? Imagine if you were reading a book, and it was all out of order, If you just finished page 122 of the latest Dan Brown novel and at the bottom of the page is asked you to turn to page 836 to continue you would be baffled and annoyed as you’d now have to take the time to flick through to page 836 to keep reading on, How much slower would the process be of reading your book?
This Is Why Your Computer Is Running Slow
When you save your file to your hard drive, your computer may save blocks of text all over the physical space that is your hard drive, it will save the image somewhere else on the hard drive, and the title somewhere else again!
What’s the problem you say? You don’t have to go looking for the parts the computer does that for you! Correct, But like it would take you longer to flip through pages of a book out of order, It takes your computer longer to access that information in such a fragmented manner. This increases the time it takes to start up programs, the computer itself, and as a result, it makes your computer feel “slow”.
This wouldn’t be an issue if it was just one file fragmented across your hard drive, but in all likelihood It isn’t just your documents that are fragmented. It’s every file on your computer and that is a LOT of data! It is also worth noting the longer you go without defragmenting the worse the problem becomes, as each time a file is accessed the hard drive may fragment it even more.
In the next part of the series I will show you how to defrag your hard drive.
I would love your thoughts, please leave a comment in the comment section below.