Windows is vastly used operating system. However, windows slow down over the time, and you feel laggy and slow read-write speed of hard drive. This issue arises due to the heavily fragmented disk drive. This post explains to you how to defragment windows 10/8/7 disk drives and speed up windows performance.
What is fragmentation in a drive?
Well, before we see how to de-fragment windows, let’s see what is fragmented drive means and how it affects the performance of OS.
The hard drive consists of the small size of parts that make up the whole drive with available size. Those small pieces are called “blocks.” When you save some file, drive split it with small parts and writes them in different blocks. This process is call fragmentation of drive.
However, when you delete some file from a drive, that particular block of drive become empty and available for writing. Now, when you write a new file, drive finds such empty blocks and write it. These blocks are so random and not in sequence. Because of random places, Drive takes more time to write pieces of the new file. Also, reading a randomly written file takes more time.
Due to this process, windows becomes slow, and you may feel the laggy and slow performance of your PC. More random written files, more time to read and write. This situation is called a heavily fragmented drive
How to fix a heavily fragmented drive?
Well, how to fix this? How to make the drive to write the files in sequential blocks? The answer is de-fragmentation. Windows provides a built-in de-fragment tool to perform this task. The process is automatic and performed on its own. You just have to initiate it and wait for it to finish.
What de-fragmentation do is, arranges files in a sequential manner. Defragged drive then require less time to read the data. Also, all empty blocks are available to in sequence, so that write speed also increases.
Lets now see how it’s done.
How to defragment Windows 10,8 and 7
De-fragging a drive is an automatic process. Windows sports a defragment tool to do it. Windows also does it in scheduled task during boot, occasionally. But, if you feel or see your drive is heavily fragmented, you can defragment windows manually.
Step1: Go to start menu and search “defragment.” Once the results showed, click on “Defragment and Optimise drives” option.
Step2: Now, click on the desired drive you want to see how much it is fragmented.
Step3: Click on Analyse button to see how much percent of drive id fragmented.
Step4: Analyse all drives and decide which drives to defragment. You must select C drive to get better performance.
Step5: Now select anyone drive and click on “Optimise” button.
Step6: You have to wait for longer here, let it finish the defragment process. Don’t turn off the PC in between.
Step7: Once a selected drive’s defragmenting process completes, select the next drive and wait for it to finish.
This way you can manually defragment windows drives.
How to defragment Removable Drive (Pendrive, External hard disk, etc.)
You must know that removable drives also can fragment. This is one of the reasons why our pen drives, hard disks get slow down after some use.
Well, you can de-fragment those removable drives too, with “Defragment and Optimise tool.”
An easy way to defragment removable drives is explained in below steps.
Step1: At first, open my computer, where all drives are listed.
Step2: locate your removable drive and right click on it.
Step3: Select “Properties” option and then click on “tools” tab.
Step4: Now click on the “Optimise” option and from opened defragment tool, select your removable drive.
Step5: Click on “Optimise” button and wait for the process to complete.
How to schedule an automatic Defragment process?
Windows set an automatic defragment process by default. You can access these settings and change the schedule timings as per your choice.
Again go to start menu and select “Defragment and Optimise drives” after searching a keyword defragment.
Just below the listed drives, you can see scheduled optimization options. The default settings read: Schedule is ON with weekly frequency.
You can change these settings by clicking the “change settings” button.
In the settings, you can select the defragment frequency. Choose from daily, weekly or monthly.
You can also select which partition you want to defragment when the schedule runs. Just tick the drives you want to select.
Ways to access Defragment tool
Well, if you cant find a defragment tool from a menu, here are the alternative ways to access it. There are few ways to access a defragment tool for different versions of Windows. We will see the ways for all of them.
As stated above you can access the defragment tool from the start menu. Just search “defragment” and select “Defragment and optimize drives” option.
Way2 – From Run command
You can directly access the defragment tool from a run tool. Just press Windows + R button from your keyboard.
No, in the run tool, type following cmd command and hit enter.
dfrgui
That’s it, defragment tool now opens in new window.
Way3 – Access from Control Panel
Defragment tool can be accessed from the control panel also.
Go to Control panel –> System and security –> Administrative tools –> Defragment and Optimise Drives.
Way4 – Access from My computer
You can access the defragment tool from my computer feature, where all hard drives and external and removable drives are listed.
Just open my computer and right click on the drive which you want to defragment. Then click on properties option and choose tools tab.
On the tools tab, now click on optimize option to open the defragment and optimize drives tool.
Way5 – Access from the command prompt
You can access this tool from the command prompt or Windows PowerShell(windows 10).
Just press the shift key and right-click anywhere on the desktop. Then select “Open command prompt here” or “open windows PowerShell here.”
Once the command windows open, type the following command and hit enter.
dfrgui.exe
That’s it. You can now access the defragment tool.
Summary –
Fragmentation of drive is a natural process, and it happens as we use the PC. If we do more file writes, deletes, modifies, more the drive will fragment. A heavily fragmented drive makes windows slower and laggy. To solve this problem and boost your PC’s performance, Defragmentation of windows is done. This is an automated process done by the windows. Or we can manually access it and start the process. This “How to defragment windows guide” explains to you the step by step instruction on how to do it. The article also describes the way to change the defragment schedule, ways to access the defragment tool and procedure to defragment a removable drive.
Hope this guide solves your problem, and you can easily defragment windows now to boost its performance. Any questions and suggestions should come in the comment section below.
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