Hi, Richard.
When we first put files onto a hard drive, they get written in beautiful
order, one after the other, each in a single piece, some short, some long.
But as we use those files, they change in size; a short one in the middle of
the deck might not all fit there next time, so we may have to put the rest
of it somewhere else. A deleted file might leave space that the operating
system can fill with all or part of a new file. Pretty soon, our files are
fragmented into pieces scattered all over the disk. When Word tries to load
a long document for us to continue working on, for example, it may have to
pick pieces from several places and reassemble them for us. This takes
time, slowing down performance.
So, it is a good idea from time to time to "defragment" the files on our
disk. We run the built in defragmenter ("defragger") or we buy and run one
of the third-party versions which may offer better results, or more options,
or run faster. It moves files and fragments around on the disk so that all
or most of our files are again in one-piece contiguous files and our
computer runs fast again, like it did when it was new.
That's the basic idea. I'm not about to get into the religious wars as to
which defragger is best or how often we should defrag our drives. ;^}
RC
