Lately here at Bimos.be we have done a study on our last three month customers and realize that people are coming to our repair shop in Brussels mainly because their computer is slow (about 68%). The other 32% needed serious hardware configuration, parts replaced, network issues solved also virus infections were popular.

In this article we will help you understand why a simple defragmentation will help your computer be faster and stable.

The first thing we have to understand is Fragmentation

This happens when an operating system (windows XP) breaks a file into pieces as there is not enough space on the part of the storage device where the file was saved to start with.

How does this happen you might ask?

I’ll try to make a visual image so you understand the mechanic, though I’ll deform the reality a little bit. Imagine you are a writer and you write your book. First you’ll create a small word document and save it. Regularly you’ll come back to this document adding pages, deleting, editing. This is a long time process; weeks, month’s maybe years. The operating system has to resize the word document each time you add pages to it, eventually the size of the word document will reach the expected size (the operating system allocates a certain free space for every new file created). The operating system will now break the file into two, putting the second part of our (book) in free spaces of the hard drive. All the file pieces are indexed in a table (FAT- File Allocation Table) The longer you use the computer the bigger this table will get, adding more fragments of files and more files will get fragmented. Before you know it the computer is trying to figure out where the hack are all those pieces, this is the point where your computer is becoming slow, not only that but fragmented files can get corrupted, fail to save so you’ll loose 10 pages of work or even worse – quit writing . I know what you are thinking now …I should quit writing :)

The second thing you have to understand is Defragmentation

It is the process where all this pieces are put together so our book becomes a continuous file, very easy to access and very easy to work with. If we ask our customers at the shop they all heard of DEFRAG. And we get the same answer “It takes a looooooong time!” Unfortunately there is no easy answer to that one. The average time is between 1 to 5 hours depending on the size of the hard drive and the fragmentation of the files, RAM (virtual memory) and CPU(processor).

Before you Defragment there are a few tricks we can teach you:

To do a defragmentation in windows XP you need to click on the Start button than choose All Programs after that choose Accessories than choose System Tools and finally Disk Defragmentor.

In the dialog box you’ll see your hard drive (one or more). Click on the first drive, usually C and hit the Analyze button. Windows will now tell you if you need to defragment or not. Than hit Defrag this is the operation that will take a long time. Repeat the operation for the other hard drives you might have. If you have an external hard drives please do not hesitate to defragment it also (a slow USB speed added to a fragmented hard drive will make a computer really slow).

Once the defragmentation is done, restart your computer and enjoy a more stable, faster computer.
Unfortunately windows does not have a very good defragmentation tool in the near future Bimos.be will put to the test some of the defragmentation software on the market and make it available on the web site.

Your computer repair shop in Brussels, Bimos.be