Defrag: Maximize the Space on Your Windows System

Deciding to get with the century and get a computer is a move more and more of our senior citizens are making. Unfortunately, they sometimes bite off more than they can chew. It becomes an ongoing struggle to simply turn the thing on and find files.

I’ve never been actually hired and paid as Technical Support, but my experiences on my own journey from computer novice to literate helps out quite a bit. Here's a trick that makes conquering the Ghost in the Machine a victory rather than another in a long line of defeats.

Defragging
Every computer should be defragged as least once a month. If you spend as little as ten percent of your time online, you should defrag perhaps once every two weeks. Defrag is short for Defragment.
The reason it needs to be done is in the basic way your computer accesses and uses files. To take advantage of every bit of memory, the system breaks up programs into little pieces and drops them in any available space on the hard drive. The more you use certain programs, the more fragmented they can become. Defragging can make your computer run faster, programs load better and it frees up space on the hard drive.

WARNING: Before you Defrag, close down everything you have open. If you’ve never done this before, it may take awhile to complete. If you have some pressing business that involves your computer, finish it up, or get to a stopping point. Defragging is like a coffee break for your computer, and it’s rude to interrupt people on coffee break. Besides which, you could cause issues in your systems if you’re accessing files during a Defrag session. A background program like your virus scan is fine, as long as it’s not actively open and scanning.

Depending on your operating system, Disc Defragmenter is usually easy to find. For most versions of Windows from 98 up, you simply go to the START menu with the mouse and click.