By Suzann Dodd, ContributorYOUR HARD drive will become full of file fragments as you use it. Further, a lot of garbage will accumulate until your computer is running very slowly and you might even get peculiar messages and obscene crashing.
It's very easy to keep your hard drive healthy. Assuming you run Windows, this is what you do.
Go to Accessories, then System Tools and click on disk cleanup. It will read your hard drive and tell you about the how many megabytes of junk you have. Don't hesitate, delete all those files. Many do not exactly exist. They are items the Operating System, in its infinite confusion, has saved because it's compulsive retentive. Delete them all. If you've never done this before, do it twice. Then go to the same directory, that is, Accessories, System tools, and click on defrag.
If this is the first time you are doing it, it will take a long time. You can get a glimpse of what is happening. Your files are scattered all over the place because they've been saved randomly.
How does this happen? You've saved an application, a file, a photo, then you've opened the application, made a few option choices, maybe added to the file, maybe enlarged the photo. There is no space between the application, file and photo, so everything is saved somewhere else.
DISK CLEAN-UP
Defrag puts everything where it belongs. Run defrag and do something else while it's working. After it finishes, run it again. Then make sure to do a disk clean-up and defrag at least once a week.
You can set the computer to automatically do this, but I find it's a pain. Can you imagine working on a document when all of a sudden it is the magic moment for your defragging to begin?
Do it yourself. Clean up, then defragment, often running the defrag twice or even three times to insure that everything is neat. Just as your house or office gets messy no matter how you try to be neat, the same occurs with your hard drive.
I have even observed some techies deliberately removing these files when they load an Operating System. This is to insure they will always have work. If you can't find these files on your computer, call the persons who loaded your Operating System and demand them.
Suzann Dodd is a writer and an attorney
