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 method to speed up XP was mentioned in a previous post: Increase Computer Speed by Cleaning Your Registry Part 3.  Here is the method again in detail in case anyone missed it. This is a completely free way to remove unneeded files from your computer and clean up your hard drive. The more free space you have on your hard drive, the quicker your computer can find and access the files it needs to work with. Running Disk Cleanup along with a few other tools as part of basic PC maintenance can help increase computer speed if you remember to run it when needed.

Here is how to get to the Disk Cleanup utility in Windows XP:

Click on Start > All Programs

Go to Accessories

Then go to System Tools and choose the Disk Cleanup option.

If you have multiple drives or partitions on your computer, then you may see a screen that looks like this:

Choose the (C:) option if you are presented with this screen. Disk Cleanup will then calculate how much space it will be able to free up, it will look like this on your screen:

Once it has completed calculating the amount of disk space that can be freed up, you will then see a screen that looks like this:

Check off which options you want disk cleanup to perform and it will tell you the amount of space that can be recovered using your chosen options. Click OK to perform the cleanup.

Your PC may not appear to be much faster than before after doing this, but when combined with other tools and methods to speed up XP, Disk Cleanup is definitely one of the things to add to your checklist when you need to increase computer speed. We will be covering other topics to help boost your PC speed in the future, so check back in the future for more helpful articles, screenshots, videos, and software overviews.

Check out the resources below for more tips on how to speed up XP:

• Ten Quick and Simple Tips to Speed Up Our Laptop! – There’sa simple way to speed up XP startup: make your system do a boot defragment, which will put all the boot files next to one another on your hard disk. When boot files are in close proximity to one another, your system will start …
• Speed Up Xp Pt1 – optimize xp for the best performance.
• How to Speed Up Windows XP…(Part I) – Windows XP is aguably the most popular Operating System today. Even with the launch of Windows Vista few months back, most of the PCs still run on Windows XP. But many of the regular users of the Windows XP complain about it getting …

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