How to Speed Up a Hard-Disk Drive

No one ever bought a car or a computer because it could go slower. If your hard-disk drive seems to take forever to go about its business, or if it’s having trouble keeping up with your CD-R burning software, chances are it’s time for a tune-up and defragmentation.

Step 1: Close any open applications. Disable antivirus utilities, screen savers and other background programs. Make sure you’ve quit all programs in Windows by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete once (don’t press it twice or you’ll restart the computer).

Step 2: Windows will show you a list of applications running. Highlight each application (one at a time) and click on End Task to close each one.

Step 3: Double-click on My Computer to open the My Computer window.

Step 4: Select the hard disk that you want to defragment.

Step 5: Choose Properties from the shortcut File menu. You should see the Properties window for the drive that you selected.

Step 6: Choose the Tools tab.

Step 7: Click the Defragment Now button.

For Mac OS

Step 1: Apple doesn’t supply a disk-defragmentation program with Mac OS, although most third-party disk utility programs include one.

Step 2: If you don’t opt for a third-party utility program, you can do a partial defragmentation by copying as many files as possible to a backup disk. Don’t include the System Folder.

Step 3: Once the files are safely copied, then delete them from the original disk.

Step 4: Copy the backed-up files back to the original disk.

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