As shown in the video, these are the steps to get to the Disk Defragmenter screen:

Click on Start
Click on All Programs
Go to the Accessories folder
Then go to the System Tools folder
Click on Disk Defragmenter

From there, you can analyze your hard drive to see whether or not it needs to be defragmented and start the defragmetation process.

As you use your computer, the files on your hard drive may become fragmented, making it slower for your computer to access them. What defragmenting does is move these fragmented pieces so that they are contiguous, which means that the different pieces of data that make up your files will be placed adjacently next to each other. This will speed up XP access times for your files since it won’t have to go to different areas of your hard drive to piece together parts of a single file.

If your computer runs slow again in the future, you’ll want to run Disk Defragmenter again to see if file fragmentation may be one of the problems with your PC.

If the above video and explanation doesn’t make much sense to you, here’s a video by Andy and Sean of Lab Rats that visually explains what fragmentation is and should hopefully clear up any confusion you may have:

Now that you know what fragmentation is and how to defrag your hard drive, hopefully running Disk Defragmenter will help you to speed up XP and your computer’s overall performance.

Technorati Tags: disk defragmenter, improve computer performance, increase computer performance, speed up xp, ways to speed up xp

This is just a quick introduction of  ways to increase computer speed. Each topic will be covered in more depth in future postings. If your computer runs slow and you want to speed it up, here are a few simple things you can try.

Delete any unnecessary files and programs from your hard drive. If your hard drive is full, it will be slower in accessing data since there is a lot more information that it needs to sift through to find the exact data that is needed at the time. Running Disk Cleanup, removing old files and uninstalling rarely used programs can not only help free up extra disk space, but help your hard drive find the data quicker, which will make your PC seem faster.

Going along the lines with cleaning up your hard drive of unneeded files, another tip for how to speed up computer performance is by checking your hard drive for errors and disk fragmentation. Since this is just an overview, this topic will be covered in more detail later. Basically, if your hard drive is full of errors or is severely defragmented, this can slow down the operation of your PC. You can increase computer speed slightly by running the error checking and defragmentation tools available in Windows.

The next way to try to optimize your PC performance is to make sure it’s free of viruses, spyware, trojans, and other malware. Viruses and malware can severely slow down your PC, so be sure to download, install, and scan your computer with some antivirus and malware removal software.

While trying to uninstall unused software, you may find that some programs will leave behind some junk files. If you know the location that the program was installed in, you can remove these files manually. Some programs will also leave behind changes in your system registry. The registry is the database of settings that your computer uses to run the operating system and any programs that you have installed. Extraneous registry settings can cause your computer to slow down. It is not recommended and can result in doing more damage to manually edit the registry yourself. You can clean up unnecessary registry settings by using a registry cleaner program.

That is a quick overview of ways to increase computer speed. Look forward to future posts as we go into more detail covering the various methods of speeding up your PC, and reviews of registry cleaners, antivirus, antispyware, and more tools to help keep your PC optimized for fast performance.

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