As you install and delete programs, save and delete photo's, video's, music, and data to your hard drive it eventually becomes so fragmented that your system slows down due to the extra time it takes finding all the relevant program files on your hard drive that you want to run
What does defrag mean? defragmentation is the process of locating the noncontagious fragments of data into which a computer file may be divided as it is stored on a hard disk, and rearranging the fragments and restoring them into fewer fragments or into the whole file. Defragmentation reduces data access time and allows storage to be used more efficiently.
To explain it more simply. Inside your hard drive case is a circular disk. All the files you have on your computer is saved to this disk. But the locations these files are saved to on the disk is randomly picked. As in (fig 1), The circle represents the hard drive disk. The red dots represents a program saved to the hard drive with about 17 files, each red dot is one of those files. The green dots represent a smaller program with 3 files.
Notice even though all the files (red dots and green dots) each belong to one program their spread out all over the disk. This is not a error or problem, it is actually the way it is suppose to work. When you save anything to the hard drive your computer system saves them to anywhere on the hard drive and it maps out the location of each file and knows what program it belongs to.
Basically put, the problem is that the system has to locate all these files to a program when you tell your computer you want to run that program. Today's programs can consist of 1,000's and 1,000's of files. This takes some time and can be one of the causes of your computer running slower.
When you defrag your disk drive. What this does is finds all the files to each program or data group and place them all next to each other in one location. As (fig 2) shows you, now all of the red dots representing that program is all next to each other , this allows your computer to find and load those files quicker.
Ok, That's enough! You can stop laughing at my artwork now!
