What are fragmented files and how to delete them?
When most versions of windows writes a file to the hard drive, it takes the first available space to write it, and if there isn’t room for all of the file, it will jump to the next open spot, and so on and so forth. After a while, with adding and deleting files, there are HUGE amounts of files that are spread physically all over the drive – these are called fragmented files. You fix this by running the disk defragmenter, and it will re-organize everything for you – but it can take a looooooooong time if the drive is highly fragmented. Since you say your drive is constantly filling up, defrag may not even run – it needs lots of extra space to work while it’s re-arranging the files. Your best bet would be to get a new hard drive to replace the full one, or get an additional drive to put all your data on – but only your personal files, not the ones used by windows or your programs. You can also help prevent some fragmentation by putting IE’s cache size down to like 10MB instead of the hug
When you delete files from your hard drive, they’re not actually removed. The computer just deletes the record of where the file was. That’s why files can take a long time to copy onto a disk, and just a second to delete. When you need to save another file, the computer considers the old places where deleted files were located to be the same as blank space, and just writes over the sectors, filling in whatever space is available. If there isn’t enough space in one spot on the disk, the file is broken into pieces and stored in multiple locations (fragmented). Windows comes with a program called Disk Defragmenter, and there are many other utilities that will do the job for you. There’s one sad fact, though – in order to defragment your disk, you need to have sufficient free space to allow the computer to make temporary copies of the files as it moves them around. If your disk is completely full and badly fragmented, you’ll need to copy some of your files onto another disk, delete as many
Firtly, you need to delete any files you no longer need. Then delete any programs you no longer need (by going into Control Panel and clicking on ‘Add/Remove Programs). Then you open ‘Defragmenter’ which you can access through the ‘Help’ icon on your start menu. Depending on how long ago you last did this it could take quite some time. I often leave it to do this while I go off to do something else away from the computer. You should really aim to tidy up your files about every week or so to keep things running smoothly.
