Patricia
From Smart Computing magazine.
Another fast, free method for keeping your hard drive running smoothly is to defrag it regularly. As programs are added to and removed from the computer, bits of files get scattered all over the surface of the hard drive. If the drive heads that read data have to move all over looking for the scattered data, programs begin to stutter and run more slowly. The solution is to pack all of the stray data into one contiguous area of the hard drive so the drive heads don’t have to move as much. This is what defragging does. Windows 98 users get the added benefit of Intel optimization software that intelligently places the files you access most often close together and also can keep most of the data for a program, such as all of the files required by Adobe Photoshop, close together.
Here we’re setting up a permanent 500MB swap file on our second hard drive to help increase the speed and efficiency of the primary drive.
Windows 95/98 (Win9x) comes with a built-in defragging tool, which you can launch by clicking Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and Disk Defragmenter. A drop-down list lets you select which drives you want to defrag, and you can click the Settings button to access some advanced options. The Settings page is where you enable the Intel software in Win98, and you can also have the Disk Defragmenter look for hard drive errors. We don’t recommend this latter option unless your hard drive is crashing unexpectedly, as it adds a lot of time to the defrag process.
Click OK to apply the settings but don’t click OK in the Select Drive window yet. First, shut down all of the extra programs that are running on your PC, including your Internet connection and antivirus software. If there are any icons showing in the System Tray (except the yellow speaker icon), you’ll need to close the programs associated with them before running the Disk Defragmenter. In some cases you may need to press CTRL-ALT-DELETE one time only and manually select a program by clicking its name in the Close Program list and clicking End Task. If you are unable to close all of your other programs, they may write new data to the hard drive and force the defragmenter to stop and start over from the beginning.
It’s important to tell Windows what type of computer it’s running on if you want to keep your hard drive running efficiently.
Even if you can’t shut down all of the other programs, click OK to run the Disk Defragmenter. You can watch the program at work by clicking the Show Details button, but don’t launch any other programs while the defragmenter is running. Wait until the process is completely finished before rebooting the computer or doing any other work. We recommend running the Disk Defragmenter every month or so. |
