There are basically three opinions about this topic:

1. Defragmentation doesn’t help.
2. Defragmenting your hard drive helps marginally.
3. If you don’t defrag, you’ll have a slow PC.

At TechieNow.com, we think that the answer is not black and white. The real answer is… it depends. To understand whether defragmentation is affecting your PC or not, you must consider the following questions:

• How important is your hard drive for your day to day work? – If you use hard drive intensive applications, then having a defragmented hard drive could help your overall performance perception.
• How much fragmentation is needed and what areas are affected? – Even if you use hard drive intensive applications, if your fragmentation levels are low or the actual areas suffering fragmentation are not needed for your program, then your fragmented hard drive will not affect you.
• How important is your hard drive on your performance rating? – Hard drives are relatively slow devices (although CDs, DVDs, the network and others are generally slower). However, there are hard drivers that perform better than others. If you have a fast CPU, graphics card, etc, but your hard drive is slow then it could drag down the overall performance experience. The windows information tool can help you assessing where your hard drive is in relation to the other devices – see Figure 1.

Figure 1- Windows Performance

All the above main sound a little difficult to assess so here are the general rules of thumb that may help you:

• Defragging as a precautionary measure is a good practice. In general, our recommendation is that you set up an automatic schedule so your hard drive is defragmented monthly
• If you have hard drive intensive applications, then you might want to defrag more often, fortnightly or even weekly.
• Your advised to check your performance score (see figure 1 above) examines how well is your hard drive performing against your other  key components that affect performance. If your hard drive has got much lower score, then you may want to think about having it replaced for a quicker one.
• You may benefit from defragmenting your hard drive if you have recently move large amounts for data like movies, photo libraries, etc.
• The above also applies if you’re about to copy large files or install big applications.

How can Techie Now Help?

Our performance boost services will check not only your fragmentation levels but also other potential areas affecting your PC’s performance. We’ll also look at your hardware components and advise you of what we find. Come to www.TechieNow.com and start your journey to a quicker PC.

www.TechieNow.com