When your computer starts competing with a snail in a race to determine which is faster, you are definitely sure that something is wrong with it. Most people blame viruses and malware for being the bad guys causing this problem.

And of course, these people are right most of the time, but in some other time, especially when you don’t have problem with virus, a fragmented hard disk drive is equally enough to take your computer into “slow motion”. Even Microsoft knew this and then suggested that we should often use disk defragmentation tools to boost our computer’s performance.

Oh! You are reading this article and wondering what is meant by fragmentation in hard disk.

O.K., fragmentation in hard drive simply means the data stored in it, overtime, becomes fragmented (wear) and split into multiple parts. This makes is difficult for hard drive to read the files and in turn slow down a computer. But fortunately, this problem can be fixed; thanks to Windows inbuilt defragmentation tool.

Now that you know the meaning, follow these steps to defragment (undo fragmentation) your drive:

Launching Defragmentation Tool

* Click the Start Button and then on Control Panel: if you are on Windows 10 like me, just right-click on the Start Button. This will bring out a list of options including control panel; simply click on Control Panel.

* In Control Panel, find the option named View By; it is located towards the top-right corner.

* If you have found it, then change the View By settings from Category to Small Icons.

* From the list of all the displayed tools, click on Administrative Tools.

* Then double click on Defragment and Optimize Drives

* Launching the tool will open a Window named Optimize Drives, and a list of all virtual drives, both internal and external, will be displayed in a box.



Analyzing and Optimizing Your Drive

* Click on (C, then on Analyze; in my case, 3% of my disk volume is fragmented.



* After analyzing, then click on Optimize.

Clicking the optimize button will start the optimization process, and to be sincere with you, this process takes a lot of time to compete, depending on the level of fragmentation in your hard drive. So I recommend hibernating your computer when the power gets low and later continue when next you have power, or better still, do it overnight.

How Often Should I Optimize My Drive?

Personally, I recommend you do this process every three months, so as to reduce the rate of fragmentation of your files and to save time required in defragmentation.

By following these steps in details, the performance of your computer should improve, but if it doesn't, It means replacing the drive maybe the best way to boost its speed; an alternative option is to increasing your RAM to see if there will be improvement. When there is no improvement after increasing your RAM, then the best option is your only option.

Culled from: http://howtotechnaija.com/boost-speed-computer-by-defragmentation-hard-drive/