Speed Up Your Computer, Part 2

In my last post, I covered the importance of using a tool like Disk Cleanup to speed up your computer. If you remember, Disk Cleanup is used to remove temporary files, unused Windows components, the contents of your Recycle Bin, etc. An old supervisor of mine always used to counsel, “Do the cheap stuff first” and Disk Cleanup is a handy tool that can get the basics out of the way in a hurry.

More Disk Space May Not Be Useful By Itself

What does Disk Cleanup get you? Free disk space. Sometimes, that’s worth more than gold when it comes to computer performance. By ensuring that your computer has adequate free disk space, you allow the computer to operate the way it was designed to. As a rule of thumb, your hard disk should always have at least 20%-25% of its available space free. If your hard disk is mostly full, it’s time to consider adding more space or reducing the amount of data you’re carrying around.

Disk Cleanup also leads to the second thing you can do to improve or preserve your computer performance.

Defragment Your Hard Disk

Disk space is only really useful to the computer if it’s clustered together on the hard disk. A few empty bytes here or there may add up to free space, but if the free space on the disk isn’t grouped together, the computer won’t use it unless it has no other option. A build in tool called Disk Defragmenter can organize the information on your hard disk and cluster the free space on your drive together. The computer will find the free space and use it to write larger files. The more clustered available space your computer has, the happier it is.

When you create files, you use free space on your computer. Likewise, when you delete files, you open that space back up. Each file space is tailor-made to fit the file you’re creating, so it’s unlikely that a new file will fit perfectly into a deleted file’s space neatly.
When a space isn’t big enough on the hard disk to hold an entire file, the computer must write a bit of the file in one place, stop to find an available spot, pick up and move its writing equipment, and finally write the rest of the file somewhere else. The computer is slowed by having to write, then stop to look for more space, then write again. The computer encounters the same problem when reading the file. It reads, stops to locate the rest of the file, moves the read/write hardware to the new space, and finally gets back to reading the file.

Disk Defragmenter, located at All Programs > Accessories > System Tools can help keep written information organized and neat, while minimizing the amount of time the computer has to spend looking for available hard disk space.

Photo Credit: Teresa Trimm, via Flickr

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