By Jin Nan Goto

The Windows Disk Defragmenter is an extremely useful tool to maintain your computer’s performance.  If you have a badly Fragmented hard drive you will notice that booting Windows and loading programs are extremely slow. Taking these file fragments and combining them and cleaning up all the clutter in the hard disk can speed up load times considerably.  For computers running Windows XP and all older versions of Windows defragmenting the drive is usually the first step in speeding it up.

In Windows Vista the disk defragmenter runs automatically by default.  It only runs when the system is idle and will not effect the computers performance.  My Vista machine runs the defragmenter every Wednesday at 1am. Vista uses the Task Scheduler to schedule the weekly defragmenting and you can schedule XP to defragment automatically using XP’s task scheduler.

These steps are all available at Microsoft’s Knowledge Base Article 555098
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555098

You can open the task scheduler from the Start Menu –> Accessories –> System Tools.  Or you can access it from the Control Panel under “Scheduled Tasks”.  When you open the Task Scheduler click on “Add Scheduled Task” to open the new task wizard. When you are presented with a list of programs to run automatically, click the “Browse” button and navigate to and open the file C:/Windows/System32/defrag.exe.

Over the next few steps you will select the time and frequency of the new scheduled task.  You don’t need to run it every day but you can schedule it to run late at night every couple of weeks when you are not using the computer.  After you set the schedule be sure that you check “Open advanced properties for this task when I click Finish” before you click the finish button.

In order to run the defragmenter automatically you need specify the drive that needs to be defragmented.  Simply type “C:” at the end of the Run field and click “ok”.