BellaOnline Forums Computers PC Advice defragmenting

How often should a computer be defragmented?

As far as I know, there is never a direct need to defragment your hard drive. It's an optimization process and therefore should be applied at will.

Since defragmenting means reorganizing hard drive structure to use the empty blocks inbetween the used ones, I would say that once in half a year is enough, maybe even once a year. I never do it, since it takes too long on big hard drives and I can live without the minor bonuses it gives.

well i think defragmenting your hd is far from a waste of time especially if u download/move data a lot, coz everytime u move something (within one disk) windows doesnt really move it, instead it add a link to the place u moved the data to. So everytime you move data this way the data will become less accessible due to all the "links" . By defragmenting ur HD the pieces of data are sorted, so the longer u wait to defragment the HD the longer it will take coz it has to correct all the movement of data since u first used ur windows.

i think once a year is enough
or if u want 2 b sure
twice a year

Never, unless you run Windows. It's not a "computer" thing, it's a Windows thing.

In my Windows days, I defragged whenever I had been installing/unintalling a lot. For me, this was usually in "bursts." After I felt like I was done messing with things for a while, I'd start a defrag before going to bed. The more often you do it, the less time-consuming it is.

If you delete files very often, you are leaving blank areas on your hard drive. When you store/save a file the system goes looking for blank spaces. It will use the first ones it finds. It may have to fragment the file in order to store it. Defragmenting merely reorganizes the disk so there are no fragments, hence files should load into memory faster. Some programs can even put the files you use the most close to the outer track so they load even faster. I would recommend you defrag every three months, even to just give the computer something to do.
Gene

Me thinks defragmenting is a waste of time. Me formats. Or at least that's the smartest thing to do. When you have two HDD's or at least don't have anything of much importance on the one HDD, or have it all on CD, I'd say you should formatt once a week. Or at least once a month. Cleaning up windows, starting over... One word: Fresh!
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