Defragment Your Hard Drive

With the business world’s continued reliance on computers to sustain daily operations comes the increasing importance of maintaining the “health” of those processors in which companies place their most valued information.

In some respects a business must treat their computers as they would their employees. It’s no secret that employees who believe their company treats them fairly generally perform better than those employees who have a negative image of their employer. While computers don’t have feelings or formulate opinions they certainly perform at a higher level when they are treated for potentially dangerous diseases.

Too often a company is left to react when they have a computer problem rather than opt for preventative measures that could alleviate potentially catastrophic issues. We hear about it in the news all the time, a network system is hacked and valuable data is stolen, an email is opened and our hard drive is exposed to a virus. It’s only after the problem exists that we begin to question what we could have done differently.

For businesses that ignore the needs of their network system and elect to wait for the problem before they do anything they are playing a daring game of roulette and their odds are not good. There is a reason why software companies offer products that keep your computer running smoothly. It’s because there is a point of no return for our computer, neglect over time can not always be corrected when the problem presents itself. This is why a business must always treat their system with software that will maintain the integrity of their computers.

A common problem with a company’s computer system is speed. Most people overlook the issue and chalk the problem up to age and accept the inconvenience of slow boot-up time and delays in file recovery or loading applications. The truth is that while age may play a role in a company’s network speed it’s often because that network has experienced a high level of fragmentation on its hard drive.

Businesses that modify files on a consistent basis, whether it’s deleting files, adding to existing files or even creating new files, become susceptible to a slow computer performance. The symptoms often lead to the diagnosis that the computer’s hard drive has experienced a high level of fragmentation.

When a request is made to save a file a computer will store that information in a designated space located in a block. When one block becomes full our computer begins to save files in a new block. The issue of fragmentation can present itself when we open a saved file and add new information, when we try to save that file it can no longer fit into the space it once occupied in the block and the computer must cut the file and place the additions into a new space. The next time we try to retrieve that file it can take the computer a longer period of time to find the pieces of information that comprise that file.

In most businesses the amount of changes made to computer’s files in a single day are countless. The question is not “Will the computer experience fragmentation” but rather “What can be done to prevent fragmentation.”

This is where that preventative software comes in handy. The solution to slow computer performance and a fragmented hard drive is defragmentation software. By running defrag software your hard drive has the opportunity to unite each of the fragmented files and keep them together. Essentially what you’re doing is not only creating a cleaner system but a quicker system as well. Defrag software will work to create bigger blocks on your hard drive so that when you make modifications to your files it can be saved and stored in one space. These larger blocks provide room for files to be modified thus working to ensure the files won’t become fragmented when they are changed.