My friend and fellow blogger Doris wrote about this in a timely post. I defragment (or defrag, for short) my hard disk religiously, at least once a week. This is akin to doing a full-scale tidying of my teenage son’s bedroom, which looks like a war-zone (perhaps someone someday will write a defragmenting program for untidy bedrooms and what have you) in the virtual world. I use O & O Defrag myself, but there are plenty of freeware defrag programs around, an excellent one is Defraggler.
Doris has explained it with unequalled precision so please read her post for complete information about this. There’s just one thing you have to remember before doing a defrag: get rid of all those pesky junk and unneeded files first. I’ve always found CCleaner to be tops in this. It’s freeware, and you can download it from here. No point of defragmenting junk files, is there?
So defrag your hard drives at least once a week for a smoother and faster computing experience.
It’s an important point that when I defrag (which is not nearly as religiously as you!) it is the LAST step in my cleanup routine. If you do it before other steps, you’ll just be re-fragmenting your files when you remove the junk!
As you know, I’m not a Windows user. I don’t have to defrag as Mac’s use a Unix core (I believe) so I’m thankful that my computer time isn’t taken up with virus scanning, defragging, spyware checking and Ccleaning.
But yes, when I do use Windows (rarely) I do use Ccleaner. That program is awesome, and I do defrag. Don’t have Vista anymore but used to set it to manually defrag once a week.
My routine used to look something like virus and spyware checking (at the same time usually) then Cclean, then defrag. I never used to notice any difference afterward, but to be honest I used to keep it immaculately clean anyway, so that’s probably why LOL.
Thanks for the comments, Lisa and Doris. Guess it’s all those housekeeping chores that make geeks like me happy in Windows.
I have set Diskeeper to defrag my drives automatically. Defragmenting helps keep the drives healthy and prevents performance deterioration.
Thanks for the comment, Roman.