Today's desktop operating system is a very complicated environment filled with technologies that used to be restricted to only the most sophisticated of server and mainframe operating systems. Virtual Memory, journaling file systems, pre-emptive multitasking all come together to help us run dozens of different programs, service and agents simultaneously on our systems. Every icon in your taskbar and in your system tray is an application that is active and sharing a piece of your system's time and resources. It's not hard to understand how all of this can start to fall down over time. Your system just isn't as fast as it once was. It takes forever to start up in the morning, or it lags when changing applications. Its time for a tune up!
Now before we get started please keep in mind that most of these things should only be done in consultation with your IT department or team. Sometimes corporate approaches have been taken to these issues or there are specific concerns in your environment that you may not be aware of. Before trying anything in this article, please be sure you consult with your internal IT staff.
First let's talk about Disk Fragmentation or more properly file system fragmentation. Your hard disk is formatted into millions of clusters of equal size. Think of these like slots than data can be placed into. These clusters are not large and most common files today have to be split across many clusters to be stored. When these clusters are located right next to each other this is not a problem. The hard disk simply reads them one after the other. When a disk is new this is the way things are written, each time something new is written the data is laid down into the next set of free clusters. Two things conspire against this over time though. The first is that we commonly delete old files or temporary files. This produces open clusters of various sizes on the disk. The next time you go to write a new file the system uses these open clusters and now pieces of your file are spread out over the disk. This can also happen when you add data to an existing file and more clusters are needed. This scattering of information is called Fragmentation and it makes your hard drive have to work much harder pulling information from all over the disk and hurting your performance. The good news is that you have the tools to fix this problem. Windows includes a built in de-fragmentation tool that will re-organize all the information on your disk moving as much of it as possible into contiguous blocks. Simply go to My Computer, right click on the hard drive you want to defragment, select properties, and then on the tools tab select defragment now. You want to do this when you will not be usi ng the system so start it before you go home for the day, or when you will be away from your system for a time. When you get back Windows will have re-organized all of your data into the most efficient layout and you should see better overall performance out of your system.
Now lets check your RAM levels. Windows can use your hard disk for extra space if it runs out of RAM, but this puts a serious damper on performance. Your hard drive is hundreds of times slower than your RAM, and the system can't use it directly, it can only "swap" less recently used things off onto the disk for temporary storage. To use them again it has to lo ad them back, and probably swap something else out to make room for the things it needs to bring back. This is a little like moving things off your desk onto a credenza to make more room on your desk. It lets you get the work done, but it is not efficient. To check this, right click on a blank area of your taskbar at the bottom of your screen and select Task Manager from the menu. Select the performance tab and take a look at two numbers, the Available Physical Memory and the PF Usage . Some PF usage is normal as Windows swaps out parts of itself that are only used on startup. If your Available memory is less than 10% of your total memory, and your PF Usage is 50% or more of the size of your total physical memory, its time to get some more RAM in your machine.
