User's Manual

Defragmenting the Hard Disk
In the following chapters, you will find out why it is important to do so and how you can use the TuneUp
Drive Defrag module to defragment your hard disks.
Introduction
There are many reasons why a computer may become noticeably slower over time. One of them is the gradual
fragmentation of the hard disk. This can be described as follows:
New files are first saved as a block to an empty hard disk one after the other. If you then, for example, deleted a
file in the middle, there would be a gap in the hard disk. Windows uses this gap later to store the next file that
you save to the hard disk. If this gap is not big enough, Windows then splits the file and stores the second half at
another location. Over time, more and more gaps are created and more and more files are fragmented into
pieces (fragments), i.e. the degree of fragmentation increases.
This really slows down the performance of your computer. Every time you call up a file, this has to be read from
the hard disk, which would of course happen faster if the file was stored in one place. In technical terms: If frag-
mentation is high, the hard disk reading heads must always be realigned in order that they can load the individ-
ual fragments of a file.
A simple way to speed up your system is therefore to defragment the hard disk. As the conventional defrag-
mentation often takes a long time, TuneUp Drive Defrag offers you two different modes. You either decide for
yourself how defragmentation should take place, or allow TuneUp Drive Defrag to make the decision for you.
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