PC running a bit sluggish? here's a little trick to speed things up a bit.

Time and time again I have a lot of people ask me how come their computer is running slow. My usually answer to them is it could be many things, and that is true. 

A few things that could cause your system to run slow are it could be that your computer is just old and needs to be upgraded, your hard drive could be reaching its storage capacity from all the files you have downloaded, and didn't delete when you were finished with them, or it could be that you have been cleaning up your system and deleting all those files have caused your hard drive to fragment.

Now before I can tell you about one way to help speed up your computer, you need to understand what is going on to cause the problem. I promise I will try and keep this short, interesting, and in layman's terms.

Think of your computers hard drive as a giant ice cube tray. Each cup in the tray represents a block for storage. We will represent saving data on your computer to adding water to the tray, and taking an ice cube out as deleting data.  After you take a few ice cubes out of the tray you fill up the empty cups with more water, but you usually have too much water to fill up one cube, so you let the extra spill into another cup.

Well a hard drive does the same thing, so if you try to save data, and there isn't enough room in a block, your computer will find another block to put the rest of the data.  The problem is that your hard drive has millions of blocks and the empty block that it finds is more than likely not right next to the block it just filled up. So your computer ends up with bits and pieces of data all over the place.

So how does this slow your computer down you ask?  Well if your data is spread all over your hard drive it is going to take longer for your computer to find all the bits and pieces of the data that you are requesting. So when your loading up programs or lots of data , your computer is running all over your hard drive to find  all the data that it needs, and causes your computer to run slow.   The official term for this is called Fragmentation.

The good news is that fragmentation can be fixed or reduced fairly easily. All versions of Windows have a program called Disk Defragmenter (defrag).  You can use this program to reduce or eliminate file fragmentation, but this is not a one time fix. Because as you  save and delete data, file fragmentation will occur again.

You should run the defrag program at least 1once a month, but you can use another tool, which I won't get into right now to have the defrag tool run on a schedule so you don't have to worry about it any more.

The easy way to run the defrag tool is to double click on your My Computer icon on your desktop (Computer  on Vista and Windows 7) to show your hard drives.  What you need to do here is  to right click on your C drive and click on properties in the menu that pops up. You then need to click on the tools tab, and the Defragmentation tool will be shown. 

I have to warn you that you might want to run this tool as you are going to bed. The reason is that depending on how bad your hard drive is fragmented, the process could take hours to complete.  I defraged a clients computer one time, and it tool 12 hours for the process to complete.   But if you keep on top of this, and run the defrag tool say once a month, it might only take a few minutes to complete.