I've been a lifelong Mac user until I built my own machine about a year ago (Windows XP). I've heard some about this defrag thing and understand the basics, but I'd like to know a little more.

 

How long could it take?

Any precautions?

Use the built-in program or download one?

 

Or any other thoughts or informations you'd like the share.

 

Thanks for helping me figure out this whole Windows thing. :)

 

EDIT: System info- Windows XP SP3, Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0GHz, Seagate 150GB HD, NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT 1GB, 2GB RAM

Edited April 2, 201016 yr by Kaphias

The defrag tool that came with XP is too slow and doesn't work that well. I'd say download a good program to defrag, either something like defraggler (which is slow but works well) or auslogics disk defrag (which is very fast but I don't think it's that good).

When I used to use a PC I was pretty skeptical about defragging my comp. It always kinda scared me but you could always do it over night as I know it does take some time to do.

Yeah you should make it a habit to defrag pretty regularly (Like once per two weeks, I'm not sure). I've always used the one that comes with Vista/7, I really don't need much else and it runs at night anyway.

 

How long could it take? Depending on the fragmentation of your HDD, it could take an hour or it could take half a day. My sister's laptop had never been defragged, she had had it for about a year then, I was going to install Linux on it and needed to partition it but before that I needed to defrag (As I couldn't allocate a single byte to the new partition, it was so fragmented). I let it run for hours, I never saw it finish. My sister left the next day on a trip so I'm not sure it even did finish. :| There's always next time I suppose.

 

Moral of the story: Defrag.

Yep, defraging is pretty important. On Windows 7's defrag utility it never took me more than a few minutes though, with my 1TB and 750GB hard drives.

Defragging's good to increase your HDD speed and takes longer the longer you leave it. The XP one's very slow, but that's what you get when you've put on an OS that's 9 years old. Honestly, I can't wait for MS to stop supporting it now.