November 9, 2007
Hard Drive Maintenance
Hard drive maintenance is an easy way to improve computer performance. Hard drive performance can be impacted by the volume of information stored on the drive.
An easy explanation is to consider for every instance of a file the operating system indexes the entry. As well if your drive is close to being full this leaves limited space for caching by the operating system. Caching is how the operating system stores files that may be needed but are not necessary at the moment. Files that are needed are stored into RAM. Without this free space your operating system will not function optimally and consider if there is no space for the drive to use caching the operating system will not boot.
Knowing the effects of a full drive, you can see the necessity for maintenance. On of the easiest ways to maintain drive space is to control the data on the drive. Uninstalling nonessential programs can greatly impact the amount of free space on a hard drive. You can review the programs installed by opening the control panel and selecting "Add and Remove Programs" (Windows xp and 2000) or "Programs and Features" (Windows Vista). Here you can review the programs installed and each is labeled with a notation of how often the program has been used. If there are programs you no longer require you may want to remove them to add to your free drive space.
Another option you may consider if you do not already have a second drive or partition is to use either an external or internal drive to use as storage. A secondary drive can be used to store your documents, back up files, and even programs. This is ideal as the C:\ is the only drive that requires this critical space. Storing files on a secondary drive will not effect performance.
Cleaning your drive of temp files and other unnecessary files is a quick way of freeing additional space. There are many ways to complete this task but using "Disk Cleanup" is the easiest option. To use disk cleanup go to Start>All programs>Accessories>System Tools and select the "Disk Cleanup" option. Once the interface opens review all file types which can be reviewed and make your selections accordingly.
The last step to better drive performance is to perform a hard drive defrag. Defrag (short for defragmentation) organizes the files on a drive in a consecutive pattern which allows the operating system to access the files faster. Running defrag will as well lessen the load on drive indexing options. To perform a defrag of the hard drive once again browse to Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools and select "Disk Defragmenter".
Once All steps in this series have been completed you should notice a difference in performance. Ideally you should complete this list once every month to maintain system performance.
By far the fastest and easiest way to increase your computers performance and speed is to run a check on it with PC Registry Cleaner. You can drastically increase your PC speed in just a few minutes.
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Filed under Blog, Hard Drive, Maintenance by patrick
Comments on Hard Drive Maintenance »
I tend to think of a badly fragmented and cluttered drive as a messy closet or desk where it takes double the time to find anything. In terms of its silent and prolific growth its like a disease which starts off harmlessly to aggaravte into serious problems like freezes, slowdowns and potential disk crashes.