PC Performance Enhancing Tools

Is your computer sluggish? Do you feel like you are wading through molasses whenever you use your computer? It could be that a simple defrag of your hard drive is all you need to speed up the performance of your computer. Files on your computer are stored in chunks. When you create a Word or Excel file, for instance, the computer stores it on the hard drive in chunks, and not necessarily all in one place. A Word document can be stored in 20 different chunks in 20 different locations on your had drive. The computer uses a needle to find the files once you execute the command to open it. The needle moves all over the hard drive, similar to a needle on a record player (for those of you old enough to remember how a record player actually works). When your files are fragmented, the heads and the needle on the hard drive have to move too much and work too hard to retrieve your files. This causes slowdowns and huge bottlenecks when using your computer. Microsoft Windows has a built-in disk defragmentation program, designed to take all the chunks of a file and store them on the hard drive in a sequential order. This speeds up retrieval of files, causing the computer to run much faster. It also cuts down on the wear and tear of your hard drive. I have found a much better program to use, mainly because it is much faster than the Windows Defrag program. It is from a company called Auslogics, and is called Auslogics Disk Defrag. Auslogics Disk Defrag is extremely simple to use, does not require any analysis phase and is faster than most of the other disk defragmentation software. It will help you get the maximum performance out of your expensive hardware investments. And, what’s most important, it’s absolutely free. The requirements for the program are as follows: Vista/XP/2000/2003 (32-bit and 64-bit supported) 64 Mb of RAM 2 Mb of available disk space I use this on all my computers once a week, and highly recommend you give it a try. You can download it for free here: http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/download Happy Defragging!