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Get The Best Defragmenter
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Defragmenting is an important task that all PC owners should be familiar with. Not only does defragmenting provide improved performance, but it can free up substantial amounts of hard drive space. Microsoft includes a free disk defragmenter with Windows nowadays, but is this the best defragmenter? Can home users do any better to defragment their PCs?
For those that are unfamiliar with disk defragmentation, here’s a brief summary.
All the data on your PC, from the files you save, to your programs, to Windows itself, is saved on your hard drive. The hard drive, or hard disk, is comprised of separate “chunks” or “clusters” of memory, each of which is referred to as a sector. Each sector (usually) has 512 bytes of storage. If you save a 400 byte item, it fits into a sector, no problem.
But we don’t save such small files – we save files of kilobytes or megabytes. These are spread among multiple sectors. For example, a 100 KB image would be saved in about 195 sectors, side-by-side.
Fragmentation occurs when the data that makes up a file is spread among non-contiguous sectors (sectors that are not side-by-side).
Using our example, say we take our existing 100 KM image, and play with it in our favourite image editor.
We fix the lighting and add some flair, and when we finish, the size has grown to 350 KB. However, there are no more contiguous (side-by-side) sectors remaining in the original save location.
So, the excess is saved elsewhere on the hard drive. It’s not saved with the rest of the file.
Since the pieces are spread across various parts of your hard drive, the time it takes to call up the image is increased. This may cause only a slight delay, but if you consider all the files on your hard drive, you can see how, en mass, fragmentation can be a problem.
Defragmentation, as you may have guessed, is the method of rearranging the parts of your files, so that they are all on contiguous parts of your hard drive.
My recommended defragger is included in a program called PC Health Advisor.
PC Health Advisor is an all-in-one software utility, and it features a detailed disk defragmenter with some really helpful options and settings.
Once you’ve downloaded PC Health Advisor, you can access the defragmenter by clicking “Disk” and then “Defrag.”
The “Analyze” button is the first step, and will scan your hard drive for fragmented data. “Defragment” is the second button, and this completes the process of sorting your data.
You are able to select individual hard drives, if you have more than one, and the defragmentation process is shown in the graphical interface. The detection matrix used to locate and track fragmented files is efficient, quickly sorting your information to save hard drive space and improve performance.
However, the best part of PC Health Advisor’s Defrag tool is the monitor function. Introduced in version 3, this tool monitors your PC and automatically notifies you if your disk becomes overly fragmented. This way, you won’t have to worry about when you scan your PC. Of course, a calendar scheduler is also included – but the monitor is something really unique.
Anyway, check it out – I think it’s the best defragmenter, and you just might agree…
