How to Defragment your Hard Drive with Windows XP ®

Built into Windows is the software to allow you to defragment your hard drive.
I will show you an easy step by step method to defragmenting your computer using Windows®. Defragmenting your hard drive is mandatory if you expect your Windows operation system to stay healthy. Much in the same way we often have to clean our house when things get disorganized, we must also clean our machines operating system. It is simple to do, and can provide you with a better responsive machine.

Step 1.
Click on Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter as shown below.

Step 2.
The Disk Defragmenter program will bring a window up that looks like this. Choose the volume you want to defragment, as you can see below we have chosen our only volume in the list named (C:). Once you have chosen the volume click defragment.

Step 3.
The program will first analyze your volume. You will probably see something similar to this screen shown below. The program will then proceed to defragment your volume you have selected.

Step 4.
Once the program has finished, you will see something similar to this screen shown below. Notice how the top has clearly far more red lines then the bottom bar just below it. This means that it has taken all the fragmented files and moved them to an area of the hard drive that they will be easier to get to when they are needed. There are some files that will not be movable, those files are windows system files.