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In the same way that your home can become un-manageable with things
scattered all over, your home computer hard drive can also get disorganized.
When the
Lego blocks are spread all over the house, it takes longer to build that
plastic castle. Sometimes pieces even get lost.
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In my home this is called "normal." In your computer, it's called
"fragmentation." It is an unavoidable part of using your computer.
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Computers store every single piece of data in files of one kind or another.
Files are stored in the computer's hard drive in clusters. Clusters are
actual physical locations on the hard drive.
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Think of your hard drive as a large set of cubbyhole mailboxes. Each cluster
is like one cubbyhole. Think of files as letters and parcels. The clusters
are all the same size, but, the files, like letters and parcels, are all
different sizes. When a file is too big to fit in a cluster, the computer just
tears it into cluster-sized pieces and puts them into adjacent clusters. I
used to do this when I was a letter carrier, but the customers complained too
much. Computers get away with it because they can remember where all the
pieces are and put them back together.
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Almost everything you do on the computer changes one or more files. Adding or
removing a program can change hundreds of files at a time. The computer puts
the files in the first available clusters. Whenever you delete a file or
remove an application those clusters are cleared out. Technically speaking,
the clusters just get marked as empty, but that's another column.
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Over time, you end up with a random mixture of full and empty clusters.
Eventually, the empty clusters get farther apart from each other. The
computer begins to "fragment" the files by scattering the files, and more
importantly, the pieces of files, into whatever empty clusters it can find.
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Your computer slows down as it takes longer and longer to find the pieces of
files and re-assemble them. The hard drive works more but produces less. If
one piece of a file gets lost, it can crash the whole system. Fortunately,
this isn't the case with Canada Post.
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You can clean up this mess using a defragmentation utility. In Windows
parlance, you defrag the hard drive. The easiest way to defrag your hard drive
is: click on the start button, select run, type the word defrag in the text box
and press the ENTER key. From the list box (drop down menu) select: "All hard
drives" and click OK.
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Unfortunately, the defrag process can take hours. The Windows defrag utility
is notoriously slow, though more recent versions have addressed this problem
with varied success. Many commercial defrag utilities are available, most of
which are more sophisticated than the Windows application.
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Happily there are also many free defragmentation utilities available on the
Internet.
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