Is Your PC Really Needs Defrag?

Is Your PC Really Needs Defrag?

If the PC went slow, everyone of us become uneasy and searching solutions to make the system faster! The solutions you may get from your friends or even from any PC technicians. They all may telling you to defrag the PC.

But the PC really needs a manual trigger of defrag in these days?

Before going into this article, you should know 'what is defragmentation?'. Defragmentation is a process of maintaining file systems, which reduces the amount of fragmentation that organized the mass storage device into smallest number of contiguous regions (fragments). This utility keeping the smaller files within a directory, as they're often accessed in sequence.

Vista or Windows 7: The system, running either Vista or Windows 7, is already scheduled to run defrag, on a regular basis - generally 1 AM every Wednesday. 

The configure schedule for Defrag will be shown in the Disk Defragmenter window, including the last run with fragmented progress.

Above picture shows the disks has been defragmented few days ago with 0% of fragmented, which means schedule of defrag is working fine.

The scheduled timing rule has an exception, when the PC is switched off every time, i.e., the PC is not in idle mode, then the defrag task will not get a chance to run; in this case defrag should be started by manually. 

Windows XP is around 10 year old version; so, by default, it doesn't supporting any automatic defragmentation, instead you may defrag the system by manually in a regular basis. 

If you're using the system heavier as for downloading, deleting, creating or writing and so on, then you need to defrag once in a week and for light use, it may be for once in a month. 

There were couple of steps to perform defrag in XP.  

Start > Run then type dfrg.msc click OK.

             

Alternately, open My Computer, right-click on Local Disk then select Properties.

 

From the Local Disk Properties window, open the Tools tab, then click  Defragment Now.

Disk Defragmenter will open and you may analyze the drive to view a report.

 

Above said is a manual process and if you wish to arrange by a scheduled process (like Vista or Windows 7), then create a task. Control Panel > Scheduled Tasks.
  

The Scheduled Task Wizard will open and select the required program to run, and our case is Accessibility Wizard. 
 

Type %systemroot%\system32\defrag.exe into File name field then click Open. 

 

Assign a name for the task and note, 'defrag' will be the default name, so you may fix any name as you wish. 

Choose the radio button of 'Weekly' as to perform this task then click Next.

 

Now select the time and day for the task you want to start. 

For 'Start time' enter - 1:00 AM, for 'Every ..... weeks' - choose 1, and 'Select the days(s)' - choose Wednesday.

Remember: the settings we made, here, is the default settings of Windows 7. 

 

The user name of default will automatically be entered, and you should enter the correct password and confirm it again then click Next.

Now a window will open with a message 'You have successfully scheduled the following task' - which means everything is done correctly, and tick the box 'Open advanced properties for this task when I click Finish' then click Finish. 

When the Advanced Properties open, fill in the Run field with- C: -after the text- defrag.exe -included a space then click OK.

One more step have to do from Settings tab for the Idle Time has to be adjusted as your PC wake-up and run the task. 

Now you’ll be prompted to fill the log-in credentials again, then click OK.

Now an icon, named Disk Defrag, will be placed on your Scheduled Task.

When it runs, the Command Prompt screen will open and run an analysis to complete the defrag process.

The process will running in the background of the system and you may view the running process via Windows Task Manager.

Now your XP system is arranged for an automated scheduling defrag process as like Vista and Windows 7.