Defrag C:One of the most common complaints that I get from people is that their computer just seems to be getting slower and slower as time goes on. There can be several reasons behind this but one of the common issues is file fragmentation.

File fragmentation occurs when a file is saved on the hard drive in pieces. These pieces are located at different places on the hard drive whic, in turn makes the hard drive work harder to get that file and it takes longer for that file to be retrieved.

One of the best things that you can do to help aleviate this issue is to defragment your hard drive. This is, essentially, the process of bringing all of the file pieces together again so that the hard drive can access them quicker.

There are several different ways to defragment your hard drive but I prefer to use the command prompt because it is quick to access and can be easily run from a batch file or scheduled.

Here are the steps to follow so that you can defragment your hard drive from the command:

  1. Open up a command prompt by going to Start→Run…. Type in cmd and click OK.
  2. Let’s assume that you would like to perform a complete defragment of the C: drive. To do this, you would simply type defrag C: -f and then press the Enter button.
  3. Once the defragmentation process has completed, you can close the command prompt.

You can repeat this process for every hard drive.

If you want to make the process even easier, create a file in Notepad called defrag.bat and save it to your desktop. The, in the file create a defrag entry for each hard drive on your system and save the file. For example, if you had hard drives C:, E:, and F: on your system, your defrag.bat file would look like this:

defrag C: -f
defrag E: -f
defrag F: -f

Then, all you would need to do to defragment your hard drive would be to double click on the defrag.bat file.

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Tim Fehlman