If you have noticed that your computer is slower than it used to be when you start up and when you go to launch applications, there is a good chance you need to defragment your hard drive. It is very easy to do and will improve the speed of the above mentioned things up to 50% depending on the severity of fragmentation.

First we need to see how bad the fragmentation is. To open disk defragmenter go to Start->Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Disk Defragmenter.

It will show your hard drives, letter assigned to the drive, file system, capacity, free space and % free. You need at least 15% free space for it to work. If you do not have 15% I highly recommend making room because there is a VERY high chance you will need to run this utility.

To find out our fragmentation hit the Analyze button. This may take a few minutes and will come up with a popup saying if you should defragment or not. View the report and scroll down partially. Look for the File Fragmentation note and the percentage. If it is over 15% I would run the utility.

All you need to do from here is hit the defragment button and it will run automatically, you do not have to answer any prompts once it starts. When it is done a popup will come up saying defragment complete for disk … and you can view the report and see how well it worked.

Once you start this utility I recommend finding something to do because it can take hours depending on the size of the disk and speed of your computer. In older machines it helps to turn off screensavers and stand by mode because they can disrupt the defragment causing you to have to start over.

That is it. You should notice an improvement once it is done. The reason this increases the speed of your computer is because of a couple things. After installing and uninstalling and installing and deleting and moving applications and files, pieces are left behind and this disk moves them to non optimal places on the hard drive. By having files span multiple sectors in your hard drive or files in a folder not be in successive sectors it creates fragmentation. The more fragmentation the more work the disk has to do to complete its task. Defragmenter will organize these files and folders on the disk itself to make it easier to run what you need to in a shorter amount of time.

Defragmenting will not change your file or folder structure you can see. It only rearranges the data on the hard disk itself. You do not have to worry about it messing with your organized folders.