Part 3 of Quick tips on how to improve your PC's performance

Posted By: D-A-L | Date Added: 22-08-2007 03:12 PM | Views: 1750

Quick tips on how to improve your PC's performance by Nathan Forrest Hi! Welcome to the third brief article in this multi-part series that will show you how to clean up your PC and improve its performance. We'll be giving you inside tips on all of the checks and improvements that we carry out when we visit our UK customers for a "health check" on a desktop or laptop PC. Each week, we'll be showing you how to carry out another part of the full "health check" yourself for free! Previous related articles: Part 1: Performance status (http://www.d-a-l.com/articles/library/143.html) Part 2: Clearing out temporary files (http://www.d-a-l.com/articles/library/144.html) Part 3: Defragmenting your hard disk Over time, the arrangement of files on your hard disk can become rather inefficient but defragmenting the hard disk occasionally can keep this issue under control. Fortunately, it is a simple task to carry out. However, before looking at how to do it, let's ensure that we understand what it is that we are trying to fix. When files are written onto the hard disk, they are saved into the first available area of free space. To a certain extent, a new PC will already be optimised with all of its files at the beginning of the hard disk, leaving a single large area of free space towards the end of the hard disk - finding a piece of free space for a new file isn't a problem. However, as existing files get deleted or moved, small gaps of free space appear towards the beginning of the hard disk as well. The next time that you save a new file, it will be broken up into small pieces that can fill those small gaps and then any left-over portion of the file will be saved towards the end of the hard disk. The problem continues. More files get deleted or moved and then more new files are saved on the hard disk, getting broken up into fragments to plug the gaps, before any remaining pieces of the files are saved towards the end of the hard disk. This is known as fragmentation. Initially, fragmentation sounds like a good idea - Windows is trying to fill up areas at the beginning of the hard disk, which are typically quicker to access, rather than saving files at the end of the hard disk, where it might take longer to get to them. However, the problem becomes clear when you understand how Windows actually reads those files. Let's say, for instance, that you have a 500KB Microsoft Word document. You find the file in your My Documents folder and double-click it. Microsoft Word opens up. Then it pauses for a while before it opens the selected document. During this pause, Windows is finding each of the fragments of the file from different parts of the hard disk before merging them all together in a temporary file so that Word can open the complete file. If the file is saved in two fragments, this isn't a big deal. But what if there were so many small gaps before you saved the file and the file was so large that, in fact, your Word document is saved in a hundred fragments? Finding 100 small pieces of a file and merging them all together takes time. Don't get me wrong: we're not talking about minutes or hours but it is long enough that you could notice that your PC is running slower than it should be. Resolving the issue is easy and we will now look at how to do it on a Windows XP desktop or laptop computer. Figure 1. 1. Go to the Start Menu, right-click 'My Computer' and select 'Manage' from the context menu (see Figure 1). The Computer Management screen will open. 2. Select 'Disk Defragmenter' from the list of available views and tools on the left of the window. You will notice that the drives inside your computer will be listed in the top right area of the Computer Management screen. 3. Select the C: drive (or other appropriate drive letter) and click the 'Analyze' button. A coloured chart will be created, similar to the one shown in Figure 2. The red lines on the chart show significant areas of fragmented files and the blue lines show areas that are optimised and not fragmented. If there is a lot of red on the chart whenever you run the analysis, then you may want to consider defragmenting your hard disk more often. Figure 2. 4. A report will also be displayed advising whether Windows recommends that the hard disk defragmentation process is run. We encourage you to view the log file and scroll down to see the values for Total Fragmentation and File Fragmentation (see Figure 3). If the Total Fragmentation is higher than 5%, then we suggest that you should run the defragmentation process even if the report does not advise that it is necessary. If the value is 20% or higher, then you will probably notice the difference in performance immediately after running the defragmentation process. If the value is 40% or higher, then this shows a significant performance issue and it would be advisable to defragment the hard disk immediately and then run the check every week. Note that the amount of time that the defragmentation process takes to run is proportionate to how badly fragmented the hard disk files were - therefore, a hard disk showing high values should be left to defragment for a while. Figure 3. The log file shown in Figure 3 will also display the most fragmented files in order in the bottom half of the window. Note that the example screenshot shows a fairly extreme example where there is a very large file (952MB) that has been created when the hard disk was fragmented. This has been saved into 1,667 small pieces in order to fill the small gaps of free space that were on the hard disk meaning that Windows has to retrieve all 1,667 fragments before the file can be accessed. 5. The Windows defragmentation process isn't always 100% successful as some files may be in use or there might not be enough areas of free space to move defragmented files into. Therefore, if this is the first time that you have run the process, we recommend that you defragment the drive, then reboot the PC and run the same process again to give it a second chance at improving performance. I hope that you found this third part of our series on improving PC performance useful. Next week's article will show you how to test the true speed of your Internet connection. You may be surprised to learn that you are not getting what you are paying for! Nathan Forrest - Future Systems (Sussex) http://www.futuresystems-sussex.co.uk This article may not be copied or distributed in part or in full from this site and is copyright D24 Media Limited.

Comments

Posted By: Digerati  31-08-2007 04:36 AM

Great article. However, I do have a couple comments. As noted in the previous article, Clearing out temporary files (http://www.d-a-l.com/articles/library/144.html), the PC could easily be cluttered with many, even 100s of Megabytes of temporary files - in fact, there could be many 1000s of small "Temporary Internet Files" alone. It makes little sense to defragment a drive with 1000s of temporary files stored on it. It not only greatly increases the time needed to defragment, it can be counter productive in terms of efficiency. Therefore, I always recommend the user delete those files first, including emptying the recycle bin. Also, many program, in particular, security applications, monitor disk activity, lock several system/critical files, and often write frequent logs. All of these activities can disrupt, or at least affect the efficiency of the defragmentation process. Therefore, before defragging, it is advisable to terminate all unneeded programs, or better yet, boot into Safe Mode, then defrag.

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