Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies®

Chapter 25. Maintaining the Hard Drive

Your PC's storage system is more than disk drives. That's because storage on a PC (and I'm talking permanent, or long-term, storage, not computer memory) is growing more and more solid state. But in the bad old days, everything was a disk: floppy, hard, or CD. Even so, among all this storage, the most important place where you put stuff is the hard drive. Obviously, maintaining that hard drive is the key to being a happy computer owner. This chapter helps show you how that's done.

Hard Drive Maintenance Tools

Windows gives you two tools for maintaining your hard drive and helping its performance: Check Disk and Defrag.

A third disk maintenance tool is Backup. It's covered in Chapter 26. But Check Disk and Defrag are covered right here, in this chapter and in this section.

• Check Disk and Defrag aren't the best tools available for maintaining your hard drive. You can find better versions of these tools in third-party utilities, such as the Norton Utilities Disk Doctor and Disk Optimization tools.

• Another good alternative for the Defrag tool is Vopt ("vee-opt"), from Golden Bow Systems:

  www.goldenbow.com

• Hard disk performance decreases as the amount of stuff on your hard drive increases. You can't do anything about this; it's just a simple truth. It takes ...