Defraggler

To regularly defragment your hard drive is a important part of the general maintenance on your computer system. Windows stores files on your hard disk in blocks of data, the size of these blocks depend on your file system and hard disk size. When you store a file that is larger than the size of one such data block, several will be used to store the entire file. However, these blocks may have to be spread around all over the disk, and this causes the reading of that file to be slowed down a great deal, since the reading arm may have to move several times to read only one file. When you defragment your hard disk, you relocate all these blocks so that they are positioned in sequence, making disk operation much quicker. The process of defragmenting you hard disk is both time and resource demanding, and it requires free space on your hard drive. The more free space, the better.

Defraggler should work on all editions of Windows, including Windows 7, and supports both FAT and NTFS file systems. You can defragment whole drives, or just certain files on a drive. Defraggler can also defragment empty space on your hard disk, so that when you later are saving files, there are more continuous large areas on your disk available, and those files will not have to be fragmented. Defraggler also has the option to store larger files towards the end of the disk, since hard disk operates faster towards the beginning than they do towards the end. This leaves more space for smaller system-files toward the beginning, which again makes the system quicker.

As mentioned earlier, defragmenting your hard disk is a resource- and time consuming job. And if you are using your computer for other jobs at the same time, the computer might be annoyingly slow. Because of this, Defraggler has the option to run with background priority. When you do this, other tasks with higher priority will get the resources it needs first, and Defraggler will use what is "left over". And when you are finished for the day, you can elevate Defraggler to normal priority, and have Defraggler turn of the computer for you once it is finished with the Defragmentation.