What does it mean to defragment a computer?
When your computer writes data files to your hard drive, it tries to do so in the most economical way. When you delete files it leaves spaces, and files will be written to fill up these spaces. If there isn’t room, the file is continued further on in another space. When a disk has been used for some time, files can be spread across multiple places in a disk. When this happens, the read head has to move about a lot to pick up the bits of the file, and this makes data recovery a lot slower. Defragging the drive moves files to put them as near the start of the disk as possible, and as near contiguous as possible. This is why things speed up once a disk has been defragged. It’s a good idea to do it regularly.
