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How To Speed up & Tune Your Hard Drive's Performance!

 

 

How To - Speed up & Tune Your Hard Drive's Performance!
By WinXpFix.com

 

 

 

Speed up & Tune Your Hard Drive's Performance How To: One of the most effective way to speed up your Windows systems, short of adding extra memory (good idea, memory cheap) or a faster hard drive, is to optimize your hard drive. Try these two free Windows utilities:

1. Disk Defragmenter One of the most important free Windows tuning program is the Disk Defragmenter. As it defragments your disk, this program can also rearrange your executable programs so they can start and run much faster.

2. Disk Cleanup Your computer's hard drive gathers junk (that's unneeded files). Windows will slows down and may act strangely if too many of these unneeded files have accumulated, especially if they are in your temporary storage folder (usually C:\Documents And Settings\user name\Local Settings\Temp). The Disk Cleanup utility deletes these junk files.

Internet Explorer is the biggest space waster of the bunch. Internet Explorer is usually configured to occupy as much as 100MB of your hard disk with temporary files. To reduce this waste. Reduce the amount of space that Internet Explorer uses for its temporary files. Go to Start > Control Panel > Network And Internet Connections and open the Internet Options icon. Or you can go to Tools > Internet Options from the Internet Explorer menu bar. Remember to come back to winxpfix.com for more how to's.

See the General tab of the Internet Properties dialog box. In the Temporary Internet Files section of the dialog box, click the Settings button and reduce the space allocation to something more reasonable, like 50MB. Click on OK. Next, click on the Advanced tab and scroll down to the Security section of the settings. Select the Empty Temporary Internet Files Folder When Browser Is Closed check box to have Internet Explorer remove all the old files automatically.

 

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Defragmenting Your Disk:

Fragmentation occurs when you add and remove files from your computer. When you delete a file, Windows marks the sectors as available, and uses them the next time you create a file. If a file gets larger and contiguous space isn't available, Windows uses other available sectors to store the new part of the file. As you continue to use your computer, your files can become more and more fragmented. When you save a new file, if no contiguous space is large enough, Windows writes new file using sectors that aren't together--the file is fragmented right from the start.

Fragmentation slows down your disk access and, subsequently, your computing efficiency, because Windows has to spend more time finding the parts of each file. The more chunks a file is split into, the slower Windows accesses the file, because the file system has to move all over the disk to find pieces of the file.

Fortunately, Windows comes with a program that moves the contents of files around on your hard disk so that each file is stored as one contiguous string of sectors--Disk Defragmenter. Run the Disk Defragmenter utility when you plan on not using your computer for some time, because it can take an hour or so, and has to restart if you change any files.

Running Disk Defragmenter

Follow these steps to run Disk Defragmenter.

Choose Start | All Programs | Accessories | System Tools | Disk Defragmenter, or right-click the disk drive in an Explorer window and choose Properties. On the Properties dialog box for the disk, click the Tools tab and click the Defragment Now button. Choose the drive you want to defragment by right-clicking the drive from the list that appears.

 

Deleting Temporary Files with Disk Cleanup:

Disk Cleanup is a program that can delete unneeded temporary files from your hard disk. Some programs create temporary files and then don't delete the files when they are through with them. If a program, or Windows itself, exits unexpectedly (or "crashes"), temporary files can be left on your hard disk. Deleting these files from time to time is a good idea, not only because they take up space, but also because their presence can confuse the programs that created them. Remember to come back to winxpfix.com for more how to's.

Note: Disk Cleanup may recommend deleting files that haven't been used in months, without regard to type. Take a look at the names of the files it recommends deleting to make sure that they don't include important documents that you haven't used in months but want to keep.

Here's how to run Disk Cleanup:

1. Choose Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup. The Disk Cleanup program runs and asks which disk you want to clean up. Choose a disk drive and click OK. The Disk Cleanup window, tells you how much disk space you can reclaim by deleting temporary files right now. Of course, this may include temporary files that your programs are currently using!

2. Click the box for each type of temporary file you want Disk Cleanup to delete. For more information on a type of temporary file, click the description; the program displays an explanation of what the files are and what folders Disk Cleanup will delete them from

3. For additional options, click the More Options tab. Three buttons provide other ways to free up disk space, including deleting Windows components you don't use, uninstalling programs, and reducing the amount of space used by the System Restore program. Click the corresponding button to try any of these methods.

4. If you want to see the names of the files that will be deleted (in a separate Explorer window), select the type of files to be deleted and click the View Files button.

5. To begin deleting files, click OK. The program asks whether you are sure you want to delete files. Click Yes.

Note: Run the Scheduled Tasks program to tell Windows to run the Disk Cleanup program regularly. If you use Scheduled Tasks to schedule running the program, be sure to run Disk Cleanup once following the steps in the preceding section so that you can choose the types of files to delete.

When you run Disk Cleanup, be sure to include the Temporary Files in the Files To Delete list. Windows stores most temporary files in the C:\Documents And Settings\username\Local Settings\Temp folder, although a few may end up in the C:\Windows\Temp folder (if you installed Windows in a different folder, they are in the Temp folder wherever Windows is installed). Windows can become confused if this folder contains lots of temporary files that should have been deleted automatically but weren't. Remember to come back to winxpfix.com for more how to's.

 

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