Computer Technical Tips: Speeding up your computer by defragmenting files or getting faster drives.

If your computer slows down gradually the problem could be that programs take awhile to access data and load files, the problem could be file fragmentation (data broken up in little parts that take a long time to read) on your hard drive. Most if not all of the Windows operating systems come with free disk defragmentation programs because they are free there is little commercial interest in promoting their usefulness. As a result these very useful programs are somewhat overlooked.

Way back when computer files were created with fixed preassigned lengths there were two drawbacks to this it took up a lot of disk space that was not totally used and when the file exceeded the preassigned space you had to create a new one. So operating systems started to be written so that file extensions could be placed dynamically anywhere on a disk drive with a pointer to the new extension. Unfortunately, one could end up with one file with lots of little segments that were spread all over the disk and would take a long time to read. This could really slow things down because although disk drives spin fairly fast and the heads can get into the correct position in thousands of a second this is still very slow compared to the electronic speeds in the chips that are the heart of your computer. Also one program can open up dozens of files and needs to access lots of data.

The solution is to run a program that looks for files that are broken up and writes a new copy as one contiguous file. These programs do not delete the original file until the new one is created so they are fairly safe to run. Ideally you should back up your entire disk before running them but it is really not necessary as long as you trust your hard drive. You would never want to run one of these programs if you are getting error messages or problems with your hard drive, but as long as your hard drive is working fine there should be no problems.

For Windows operating systems select programs from the Start menu, then accessories, then systems tools and you will then see the icon for the program. To run these programs you would want to shut down as many applications as possible first because they can lock up files and prevent them for being defragmented. One way to do this for Windows operating systems is to restart them in safe mode and then defragment. You may be amazed at how much faster your computer runs.

Because disk drives are comparatively much slower then the electronics of your computer you can significantly speed up a computer by replacing a hard disk drive with one that has a higher RPM or can position the heads onto the place on the disk faster. This is measured in average access time which is the average time for data to be delivered and is mostly influenced by the mechanical delays (spin and head positioning) of the hard drive. Depending on how the computer is used the speed improvement can be far more noticeable with a faster disk drive than with a faster central processing unit.

If after defragmenting the files on your disk drive programs still start slow and your computer is slow when you switch between programs you might need more memory




Most of us have experienced our PCs slowing down to a crawl and thought the worst! A virus must have taken over our computer. There is a way to find out which program is hogging resources and causing your computer to slow down.

For Windows XP and 2000 there is a program that allows you to see which program is causing the problem. You can also purchase programs like this for the earlier Windows operating systems. You hit the Ctrl, Alt and Delete keys together and this program will start up it is called Windows Task Manager in XP but it might have a slightly different name in Windows 2000 and all the directions that follow may be slightly different for Windows 2000. The performance tab shows a graph of the CPU (Central Processing Unit) usage and the Page file usage history.

Usually if there is a problem the CPU will show that it is running all of the time or 100%. This does not alway mean you need a faster computer though it might if this occurs frequently. You next want to investigate this further by clicking on the Processes tab. This will show the file names of all the programs that are running and the percentage of CPU usage that each is using. Just look down the CPU column and find the one program that has a high percentage of usage. Some software packages use several programs so you may not recognize the name. Once you have the file name of the guilty program I go on the Internet and search for this name. More than likely someone else has also experienced that this and you will get some information about how to handle it. If you do not get any information from the Internet you can search for the file name on your hard disk drive with the file search utility (Click on Start, Search, For files or folders – in the traditional start menu of Windows XP) . Based on the directory the file is in you can usually tell which software package the program is part of and then contact the software provider for more information. The lower displays on the Windows Task Manager shows page file usage. (A “page” is a contiguous group of memory.) However, on every XP machine I have ever seen the graph is just a straight line and does not show very much. For this reason I recommend FreeMeter.

The Freemeter Display

As its name implies it is free though there is a more robust version that you have to pay for. FreeMeter does show page file usage and is available from http://www.tiler.com/freemeter/.

But first, what is so important about page file usage is that it can indicate that you need more memory or one of your programs is utilizing a lot of memory. Now to explain this... Memory is permanently stored on your hard disk drive but a hard disk drive is too slow for a processor to directly access so it always runs programs and accesses data from the memory on chips. Most machines do not have enough memory to run all of the programs and the data these programs access simultaneously. The PC saves sections of memory that has not been used for a while in the Page file or swap file (older versions of windows) on your hard disk drive. When memory is referenced that has been stored in the swap file the computer makes space in memory by writing some data to the swap file on the hard disk and then reading the memory you need. This activity can really slow you computer down. It will occur most often when programs start up and you are switching between programs.

FreeMeter displays a set of meters that show up in the lower right hand area of your screen called Systray. (see picture above) You will be able to see what is happening so you can observe if one particular program is causing a problem or the problem is just not enough memory. It is a great program to have. The other nice thing about FreeMeter is that it also works on Windows 95 and up and older versions of windows did not come with a utility that like this.