Do You Recognize Your Computer’s Problem

Have you been tired of your sluggish computer? You might be thinking of getting a new system or buying a new one. There is no need to spend the extra money yet. It your computer is less than 5 years old, some maintenance work would save you the cash and extend the durability of your computer.

You may have experienced problems like system failure, freezing up or performance slowdown. Computer problems like these are related either by software or hardware. If you have updated your software, then there should be a hardware problem. Getting to know the cause of hardware problem is vital to doing the right maintenance and making your hard drive last longer.

The information in your hard drive is saved in “clusters”. Theses clusters have a fixed size and not formed in a contiguous way. When you install a program, your computer store the data randomly in as many clusters as it needs to fit the program.

In other words, when you install a program to a clean hard drive, the new data is saved in one complete block in it. And when you need to use it, your computer can find it rapidly.

With regular use, your hard drive becomes full. When you add new files, uninstall programs and delete files, empty spaces are left in your hard drive. These free spaces are not next to each other. They are like gaps. Then when you install new programs or store files, they are not able to be stored in one complete block. They have to be split into little pieces to fill the gaps. Therefore, one file or program is broken up into several fragmented files and dotted over different locations in your hard drive. Your computer has to check on these locations and collect these little pieces and put them together when you need to use program or access the file. The more pieces the file or program is split into, the more time is required to collect them. And your computer is becoming slower and slower over time.

One way to address this problem is defragmenting your hard drive. This operating rearranges the files in your hard disk to a contiguous form. Defragmentation is a process that moves the fragmented files together. There will no longer be any gaps on your hard disk and your computer will run faster to find the files that you need.

Defragmentation is vital to your hard drive because when you access a file, the read head of your hard drive has to go over the possible places to find it. Your computer slows down because it takes longer for the read head to find the files. Therefore, you need to defragment your hard drive to keep your computer in health. You could run the defragmenting program to see if your computer needs defragmentation.

Your computer is like your car. You need to pay close attention to its condition and do the maintenance work routinely. It may not have problems right now but if you neglect the preventive work, it may raise you much more trouble. Try defragmenting your hard drive and you will be pleased find that your computer’s optimal efficiency is back.