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Defragging
Your Hard Drive
So your hard drive is not
performing like it used to? Programs kind of loading up a little, more
slowly than they used to? What your hard drive needs is a good
"DEFRAGGING".
Here are the
steps to "DEFRAGMENTING"
YOUR HARD DRIVE:
1. As
with many procedures in Windows 95 or 98 , there is more than one way to get something done, but we're going
to be consistent and get to this utility just like we did for
SCANDISK:
1) Go to your desktop,
(L) click on MY COMPUTER, find your hard drive icon, usually C:, and (R) click
on it and choose properties.
2) The dialog box that
appears has a General tab and a tools tab at the top. (L) Click on tools,
and then find the box (there will be three) that says "Defragmentation
", click on "defragment now".
For Windows 2000 and XP
users: At this point, click on defragment. Let if go through
it's process, and don't do anything else while defragging is going on.
Again, it is a much faster process than with Windows 98, depends on your
defrag but will take longer if you don't do this weekly.
Link to 7 weekly tasks
3) A dialog box will
pop up and immediately will begin to defrag your hard drive. If you have
more than one hard drive, or the one you have is partitioned into more than one
drive, it will ask you which drive you would like to defrag. You choose C:
or D: or E: which ever is the letter that designates your hard
drive. And the you can repeat this procedure at the end of the
defragmentation when the box asks the question: Would you like to choose
another drive to defrag? If you have another drive choose that drive
letter and resume. This
process can take several hours, so don't worry if your computer isn't zipping
through this, especially if you haven't run this utility
before.
4) You can click on
details in the defrag box that pops up, and watch it defrag. It's very
interesting, once. And then, it's just as fun to let it run at night when
you are asleep.
5) You won't be able
to do anything else when your hard drive is defragging, but the next day, your
computer will run like it used to.
A tip:
Be sure to turn off your screensaver before you defrag or scandisk. You
can do this by double-clicking your "My Computer icon on the desktop".
Then, double-click on your "control panel". next double-click on your "display
icon", find "screensaver" in the display properties box, and click on it.
About the middle of the box, is a drop-down menu showing a screensaver name, you
want to click on this and find "none". Then click "apply" at the bottom of
the box, and then "ok". You have now turned off your screensaver. To
turn it back on, just do all the same except choose a screensaver where there is
"none" showing. (link
to defrag newsletter)
BACK
TO SCANDISK
I really recommend Diskeeper
these days, click to find out more and how to purchase! It works so
much better than defrag!
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