Pixie's Pad

Before I introduce the first tool, I’ll explain a bit about drive fragmentation, in layman-ish terms.

Your hard drive’s space is split into fragments, like ’slots’. When you save something to the hard drive, your computer looks at how much space that thing needs, and allocates it a suitably sized slot. Unfortunately, your PC is quite incapable of allocating related data sequentially – so as you’re filling up the disk, deleting things and freeing up slots only to fill them again with something else, your hard drive gets quite messy. This slows down the speed at which your PC can access the files on your hard drive, because it needs to find them first – and they’re not in any order. This also affects your PC’s performance, because when you’re running something, your PC will use a part of that free space as ‘temporary memory’ to store the information about the program you’re running. The more full your disk gets and the more use it’s seen, the worse this phenomenon becomes. You may have 40GB of your 250GB disk left, but that 40GB isn’t in one ‘chunk’ of free space. It’s spread out all over the place – it may even be in  40 1GB slots.

Defragmentation tools scan your drive, look at the types of files on there and the space available to work with, and re-organise everything to get those chunks of free space in more manageable locations and to organise what’s stored on there so that it’s easier for your PC to read. Effectively, it improves your PCs performance.

Ever used the Windows defragmenter? It’s crap. Sometimes necessary, but crap all the same (it’s Windows, after all; what did you expect?).It takes ages, it’s not particularly user-friendly, and it’s very basic.

Rusty pointed me to another option called Perfect Disk. As well as your normal fragmenting, it offers something called ’smart placement’ – simply put, it organises your files so that the ones that need accessing the fastest for best PC performance are strategically placed on the part of your hard drive’s disk that is easiest to get to. If you’re a gamer, you can specifically ask it to put your games near the center of the disk and that’ll give you a performance boost when you run those games.

Perfect Disk isn’t free, but it does have a free 30 day trial – even if you only use it once, it’s worth it because you don’t need to defrag your drive often. If you buy it, it’s only $40, which I think is worth it for a good defragmenter that kicks the crap out of the Windows one!

This is their website – www.perfectdisk.com

However, downloading from their website requires you to put in your email address with this nasty disclaimer: ‘you acknowledge that you may be contacted via email regarding this or other Raxco products’ – so I’d recommend downloading from CNet instead:

http://download.cnet.com/PerfectDisk/3000-2094_4-10654012.html

The second piece of software is called CCleaner (‘crap cleaner’). It does what it says on the tin – cleans up all the crap on your ‘puter; things like cookies, temporary files and folders, leftover installation files, etc. Usually you’d accomplish this in a Windows OS by lots of clicking around hunting for things, but CCleaner does it all from one neat little free application. I cleaned my PC the ‘hard way’ on Saturday by manually removing temp files and stuff, but when I installed and ran CCleaner it still managed to find and delete 2GB of crap.

http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/ – give it a go