In the resulting dialog box, click the Tools tab, and then the Defragment now… button: In Windows Explorer, right-click on the drive you want to defragment and click Properties: Let’s fire up the disk defragmenting tool. quicker) to read when they’re gathered together in order. It takes time to do all that running around to read the book from beginning to end.ĭegfragmenting is nothing more than the hard disk equivalent of collecting up all the pages and putting them next to each other, in order, for every book on your book shelf. That’s a fragmented file – lots of “fragments” scattered all over the disk. In order to read your book in order, you’re racing around the house like crazy because the pages are all over. You have a list of where each page is, so when you want to read your book you go find page 1, then you look on the list for page 2 and go to that, then look up page 3, and so on. Imagine that you have a book, but that the pages are randomly scattered throughout your house. To summarize from a previous article What is ‘defragging’ and why should I do it?: I’ll also address some of the most common myths of defragmenting.
While we’re exploring, we’ll also look at a brief refresher on what fragmentation is, why defragmenting is needed, and how to do it yourself, if you want to. The good news is that for reasons we’ll explore, defragging in Windows 7 is actually something you rarely need think about any more. Disk defragging, or more correctly “defragmenting,” is the source of many questions, more than a few misconceptions, and many articles here on Ask Leo!