Defragmentation

Defragmentation sort of sounds like something an Army bomb squad might have to do, doesn't it? But actually it can be pretty important to computer users. After upgrading our memory and seeing a significant jump in performance, I informed Carolyn that about the only things we could do now to speed up the old machine was to clean up our desktop (I'm not sure that helps the computer any but it would make ME more productive) and see if our disk needs defragmentation. That means gathering all the bits and pieces of disk storage that a program needs and putting them next to eacfh other. As you can imagine, such a program works best when nothing else is running on the computer.

I thought you might be interested in seeing what our two disk drives looked like - before and after defragmentation. The defrag program informed us that the internal drive (top chart) didn't need defragmentation but the external drive did. I would have guessed they both needed it.

Internal Hard Drive
Red stripes are fragmented files - can slow you down

External Hard Drive
Top ribbon is before defragmenetation - Bottom is after