Windows XP Hacks

Speed Up Your Hard Disk by Improving Defragging

One of the simplest ways to speed up your PC is by defragmenting your hard disk. Here’s how to get the most out of XP’s built-in defragmenter and a third-party program that should speed up your hard disk even more.

Perhaps the simplest way to speed up your PC is to use a disk defragmenter, which will help you open applications and files more quickly. As you use applications and files, they get spread out in fragments across your hard disk. The next time you go to use them, they take longer to open because your hard disk has to find each of those disparate fragments so they can be assembled when you open the file. A disk defragmenter stores files and applications contiguous to one another so that they can be fetched much more quickly than if they were spread out across your whole disk.

XP includes a built-in defragmentation program (sometimes called a defragger), which you can run by choosing Control Panel → Performance and Maintenance → “Rearrange items on your hard disk to make programs run faster.” But there are ways you can use it more effectively, and there are third-party programs that do a more effective job of defragmentation as well.

Defragment Boot Files

One of the biggest improvements of XP’s defragger over previous Windows versions is that it can perform a boot defragment, placing all boot files contiguous to one another so that you boot faster. The boot defragment option is usually enabled by default, but there’s a possibility ...