Let me ask you this – have you ever heard of hard disk defragmentation? I am sure you have but once you heard it you blanked out because it sounded way too technical and if you are like me – technical is not what I do.

I guess it’s kind of ironic that I’m writing a technical article about this subject. But this is for those people who are like me and don’t think about PC maintenance as anything more than emptying our recycling bin. There is a lot of factors that go into making our systems run smoothly – like our cars computers are necessary in our modern times.

Let me see if anything I say next rings a bell with you. Is your computer so slow that you often compare it to an old lady or man on a Sunday morning drive in a Gremlin? Are you tired of opening up Internet Explorer and expecting one window but getting ten instead?

Or you need to write a work document and you open up Microsoft Word and normally it should just pop right up because it is just writing text but takes twenty minutes. PC repair is nothing to shake your first at or cover your ears when you hear it.

One of the first things a technician will ask you if you have defragged the hard drive. Stop scratching your head because they are talking about hard disk Defragmentation.

So what is it, well imagine taking a clay pot and shattering it on the floor. Look at all those little pieces – you just fragmented a clay pot. That’s almost how your hard disc looks. Over time it gets worse and worse. Programs that worked fast now work slower. Programs that worked slow now work slower or just stop completely and sit there for hours trying to find some piece of the puzzle.

You can perform Pc repairs until the cows come home by opening the case and cleaning out the dirt and computer hairballs, but if you don’t run a hard disk Defragmentation utility you are not actually doing much.

Programs will always look for a chunk of space where it will fit but if your program is 10 megabytes and all it can find is a 5 megabyte chunk it will take it then it will look for another suitable chunk. It will continue like that until the entire file is on the computer. Hard disk Defragmentation is the process of reorganization.

More information about Computer maintenance is here.