Hard Disk Fragmentation can often sound like a scary phrase and yet it can hamper the overall performance of your computer and, once identified, can be improved relatively easily.

First, you need to check if there is a problem. A quick way of doing this in Windows XP is to click Start then My Computer which will show a list of your drives.

Right click on the drive, select Properties and click on the Tools tab. Next, click on the button Defragment Now button.

Now you just need to ensure your drive is highlighted and click on the Analyze button. When completed you will be informed whether the drive could benefit from de-fragmenting, if so you can either click on the View Report button to obtain further information about the scale of the problem, start a de-fragment or simply close the box and do nothing.

If you select Defragment the process will begin and you can either wait for the process to end (it can take some time!), Pause the process or Stop the process completely.

Prior to de-fragmenting it might be best to switch off the screen saver and perform little, or preferably no activity, on the computer during the process as these actions will likely hamper the process.

If you find you use the option regularly you could always set it up as a scheduled task simply by navigating the menu to Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Scheduled Tasks.

Double click Add Schedule Task then click Next the Browse and type the following into the File name input box then click Open (We will specify which drive to de-fragment at a later step).

%WinDir%\system32\defrag.exe

Give the Task a meaningful name then select the frequency you wish to perform the de-fragment and click Next. On the next screen select a suitable time to start the task and select Next again and Next again on the following screen (unless you need to specify a particular account under which to run the task – as the task will need Administrator rights to run this program). Finally, click Finish.

Finally, you need to tell the task which drive to work with so right click on the newly created task and select Properties from the context menu. In the Run text box, after the program name, add a space then the drive letter followed by a colon as in the image below (For the screen grab I have used the C drive). Finally, click Apply.

That is all there is to it – it looks a lot but once done you will have a regularly de-fragmented drive.

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