Folks, I am a "seat of the pants" computer user who has learned without much training. I can do many basic functions and always like to learn more. I do not know proper terminology very well. I look at videos a lot, shop on-line, do photography a lot and use e-mail a lot. I was advised that I should probably "defrag" my computer (hard drive?) to clear it of left over things. I have a Dell desktop. It operates well and I like it. What is "defrag"? How do I "defrag"? Should I do it? Thanks.

Defragging a hard drive will not delete unnessescary files, it just arranges files to load [slightly, if at all] faster [unless your drive is always full and you've been using it for years]

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Thanks for the reply. So...if I have a whole lot of stuff in my history and just delete it, it is gone and not stuck somewhere in there clogging things up? I thought deleting history was just a kind of superficial action and those things were still there. Is there any kind of periodic thing I should be doing to keep things moving smoothly?

I suggest defraging every two to three weeks just to keep it running smoothly.

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Can you explain to me how I can do the de-fragging? Thanks.

yeah on the start menu, go to start/all programs/accessories/system tools/Disk defragmentor. Click on the Disk Defragmentor icon in the system tools and it will open up the disk defragmentor. There will be a button saying analyze and one saying degragment. Click on defragment and it will analyze then begin to defrag thats all you need to do. It may take sometime depending on the size of your hard disk. If you need anymore help then please ask. JustinGH

Thanks for the assistance. I'll do that this eve and see how it goes. I appreciate learning these types of things.

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thats fine rancocasrich glad to be of help.

In the context of administering computer systems, defragmentation is a process that reduces the amount of fragmentation in file systems. It does this by physically reorganizing the contents of the disk to store the pieces of each file close together and contiguously. It also attempts to create larger regions of free space using compaction to impede the return of fragmentation. Some defragmenters also try to keep smaller files within a single directory together, as they are often accessed in sequence.

Immovable files
The presence of immovable system files, especially a swap file, can impede defragmentation. These files can be safely moved when the operating system is not in use. For example, ntfsresize moves these files to resize an NTFS partition.


Fragmentation buildup
On systems without fragmentation resistance, fragmentation builds upon itself when left unhandled, so periodic defragmentation is necessary to keep the disk performance at peak and avoid the excess overhead of less frequent defragmentation.

Myths

Effects on system health
Defragging the disk will not stop a system from malfunctioning or crashing because the filesystem is designed to work with fragmented files.On Microsoft systems, since defrag cannot be run on a filesystem marked as dirty without first running chkdsk, a user who intends to run defrag "to fix a system acting strangely", often ends up running chkdsk, which repairs file system errors, the end result of which may mislead the user into thinking that defrag fixed the problem when it was actually fixed by chkdsk.

In fact, in a modern multi-user operating system, an ordinary user cannot defragment the system disks since superuser access is required to move system files. Additionally, file systems such as NTFS (and most Unix/Linux filesystems) are designed to decrease the likelihood of fragmentation. Improvements in modern hard drives such as RAM cache, faster platter rotation speed, and greater data density reduce the negative impact of fragmentation on system performance to some degree, though increases in commonly used data quantities offset those benefits. However, modern systems profit enormously from the huge disk capacities currently available, since partially filled disks fragment much less than full disks. In any case, these limitations of defragmentation have led to design decisions in modern operating systems like Windows Vista to automatically defragment in a background process but not to attempt to completely defragment a volume because doing so would only produce negligible performance gains.


Approach and defragmenters by file system type
>>FAT: DOS 6.x and Windows 9x-systems come with a defragmentation utility called Defrag. The DOS version is a limited version of Norton SpeedDisk, and the Windows version is licensed from Diskeeper.
>>NTFS: Windows 2000 and newer include a defragmentation tool based on Diskeeper. NT 4 and below do not have built-in defragmentation utilities. Unfortunately the integrated defragger does not consolidate free space. Thus a heavily fragmented drive with many small files may still have no large consecutive free space after defragmentation. So any new large file will instantly be split into small fragments with immediate impact on performance. This can happen even if the overall disk usage is less than 60%
>>ext2 (Linux) uses an offline defragmenter called e2defrag, which does not work with its successor ext3, unless the ext3 filesystem is temporarily down-graded to ext2. Instead, a filesystem-independent defragmenter like Shake may be used. However the Linux System Administration Guide states that, "Modern Linux filesystem(s) keep fragmentation at a minimum by keeping all blocks in a file close together, even if they can't be stored in consecutive sectors. Some filesystems, like ext3, effectively allocate the free block that is nearest to other blocks in a file. Therefore it is not necessary to worry about fragmentation in a Linux system."
>>vxfs has fsadm utility meant to perform also defrag operations.
>>JFS has a defragfs utility on IBM operating systems.[citation needed]
>>HFS Plus in 1998 introduced a number of optimizations to the allocation algorithms in an attempt to defragment files while they're being accessed without a separate defragmenter.[citation needed]
>>WAFL in Network Appliance's ONTAP 7.2 operating system has a command called reallocate that is designed to defragment large files.
>>XFS provides an online defragmentation utility called xfs_fsr.
>>SFS processes the defragmentation feature in almost completely stateless way (apart from the location it is working on), so defragmentation can be stopped and started instantly.

intresting

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