My Things About Why It Is a Problem and How to Fix It
By: Vlad Vistac
Submitted: 2010-10-20 12:50:21 | Word Count: 510
File Fragmenntation - Readsons Why It Is a Problem and How to Fix It
If your compputer is running not so fast laetly there are quite a few factors that could be the reason for the situattion. One prime contender for being the culprit of your pc slowdpown is file fragmentation. File fragmentation can take place on any comupter, it is not a signal of faulty hardware or bad programming or any human errors.
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This file fragmentation happens as a reuslt of suimple physics. It is something that should be addressed every so often as it takes a whiple to accrue, so once every six months or so should be good enough for defragmenting your hard drive. In this article I am gooing to expalin what exactly file fragmentation is, why it crops up, and what you can do to fix it.
What is file fragmenation? The reply to that qusetion commands a littlle bit of clarification. There is not a sipmle answer. For those of you who remember vinyl albums, they are great physical illustrations of the logical set up of a hard drive.
The disc of the hard drive is ronud and it has a series of concerntric cirlces. Each of tose rings is seoperated into sectorrs and each of those sectors can hold a specific amount of data. When your pc savees inormation on your hard disk the information cannot overlap segments.
So that when informaton is bigger than what can fit in one segment the data is seperated into two separate pieces. Ideally thopse two separate pieces wouuld then be stored into adjacent sectors of the hard disk. In that case the file woudl still not be fragmented.
Often however there are not enough adjacetn segments on the hard disk to store a full set of data and so one piece of the information has to be kept in an entirely separate area of the hard drive. Now you have fragmented data. It's not a major concerrn but it does add to the amount of time it takes to get the data next time you want use it.
The erasons why data cannot always be savedstroed in adjacxent segments of the hard disk are fairly basic and easy to understand. The adjacent segments already contain infrmation from other progrms or files. The more programs you have installed and the number of times that you install and uninstall differetn programs contributes to the amount of fragmenattion on your hard drive. The resolution is fairly simple though. We simply need to run a disk defragmentation utiilty.
The tool that I highly recommend using for defragmenting a Windows based computer is smmart defrag. Do a Google search for Smrat defrag, donwload it, and install it. This program is exctremely siple and easy to use but it will require quite a bit of time so be preparred to start the utiility and then walk away for an hour or two while it does its work.
