Defragmenting Your Hard Disk

• The Disk Defragmenter tool rearranges the files on a disk/volume, so that every file occupies a contiguous space on disk storage, eliminating file fragmentation. It will also try to group the different blocks of free disk space in one large contiguous area, eliminating free space fragmentation. So after significant changes to a volume, like after a Disk Cleanup or uninstalling of an application, you should run the Disk Defragmenter to improve speed and reliability of the disk.

• The Disk Defragmenter is built to provide defragmentation functionality for local storage on standalone systems and servers. This tool does have its limitations, but it also has great benefits, such as keeping up the reliability and performance.

• As with the most other System Tools, you need to be member of the Administrators group to be able to use Disk Defragmenter. But before running Disk Defragmenter, you should make a backup of the system.

Cleaning Up Files

• At different places on the system disk/volume and other disks/volumes, temporary files and other obsolete files will occupy storage, fragmenting the volumes and slowing access to the volumes. Periodically running Disk Cleanup will identify these files and enable the administrator to remove them from disk.

• You can only run Disk Cleanup interactively because it requires the user to select the categories of files that need to be removed. Disk Cleanup, based on Registry information, automatically determines these categories. One of the categories is temporary Internet files, which can take up...