Defragmentation in Windows XP

Hello again people,

Today I will share this video tutorial on how you can Defragment your computer’s hard drive. Now, this being my very, very first video I have probably created a mess of everything. I was testing the software, so I didn’t quite know what I was doing. Nevertheless, I give that to you in the final version of what I considered it to be “good enough”. I don’t like going back and fixing stuff just so it is absolutely perfect. I am a neat freak but I do want you to know that, after all, I am a person too and I am allowed to make mistakes.

I chose the topic of defragmentation simply because I happened to work on a client’s computer today, and that thing was S.L.O.W. So as usual I started with the normal questions: Do you need to have 4 toolbars in your Internet Explorer? How about them 15 types of instant messengers, and that Picasa, Kodak, Adobe and I don’t know what else photo management software running at the same time? The answers were: errr, don’t know what these are, need that, don’t need that. Normal, okay. Defragmentation time come… and I froze. That client’s hard drive was sooooooo fragmented I had no clue how it was still running.
So, what exactly is defragmentation and fragmentation. Why is it important, why do we need to worry about it? Here’s a veeery bad example. Imagine you gotta work with buckets of water. Place 20 of those buckets in a straight line. Now fill the first 7, one after the other. Now fill 3 more. Now fill 5 more, then the other 5. So what do we have. 7-3-5-5. Imagine these are files with different sizes. Now empty the 7 and the first 5. You now have 7Empty-3Full-5Empty-5Full. This is where you are thinking – He’s lost it! What a nutter! Moron, etc!

I know, I know it sounds ridiculous, trying to compare computer files and water buckets. But that’s my example. The buckets are the storage on your hard drive and the water in them is the size of various files. So having said that, 7Empty-3Ffull-5Empty-5Full. Now try and pour 4 buckets at the beginning, you are okay. You now have 4Full-3Empty-3Full-5Empty-5Full. Now try and pour 5 more buckets. Ooops, you will have to do 3 buckets and 2 more in the other available spot, where the original 5 were. So we have 4Full-3Full (out of 5)-3Full-2Full(2 out of 5)-3Empty-5Full. We had to split our 5 into a 3 and a 2. Or, we had to “fragment” the process. First pour 3 then add 2 more.

And that’s exactly what happens with computer hard drives. Some files are too big for certain spots so they span (or fragment) to wherever possible. So one file can really be in a lot of places. Now, those twenty buckets, if you had to fill them up, I’d say you’d be upset to carry water back and forth between the different buckets in the line. Same thing with the hard drive. It has to find all the pieces of a file, and since you hard disk is spinning the laser jumps all over the place. And that takes time. Sure, milliseconds you say, but those can quickly add up and sooner or later you will notice a delay. Sometimes so big it actually results in catastrophic crashes of the hard drive, with data loss, etc.
Now, what defragmentation does is quite simple. It takes almost all of those “fragmented” files, puts them at the end of the hard disk and then one by one, re-writes them to it. This way, all of the files are together.

Thank you reading and watching the video, hope to see you soon.

Tagged as: Computer Maintenance, Defragmentation, Windows XP