5. Scandisk!

One of the most some-what common and hidden problems that contribute to sluggish PC performance can be repaired or atleast recognized by the system as faulty. Doing so will help the system by-pass that region on the hard drive and move the data from the bad areas to much healthier ones. Much more technicality go into this process which we will skip ofcourse

This procedure is easy and will require you to select an option (See figure 1 below) and restart your computer and allow up to an hour or two (at times) for the process to fully complete. Make sure you do not press any keys when you’re prompted that Scandisk is about to run on your system (See figure 2). This utility is built into all Windows versions – Both Windows XP and Vista have the same procedure to perform the scan

Windows XP and Vista

1. From your desktop, double click the My Computer Icon – In Vista: Click Computer

2. In the My Computer window, right click on your C: Drive and click on Properties then on the next screen click the Tools button

3. Under the Error Checking section, click on Check Now

4. You will have 2 buttons under the Check Disk Options, select both options

5. The system will inform you that it cannot perform the disk check and will schedule it for the next reboot. Click Yes and restart your machine.

6. Once the machine has restarted, allow the scan to go through fully (Figure 2). If you pay attention to the scan process and specially the result data displayed at the end, pay attention to the section under Bad Sector / Bad Clusters. If the result shows anything but 0 (Zero) then this will be your first indicator that your hard drive is on its way to fail / crash some time soon. Time to buy a new hard drive and get your data copied over to the new hard drive. This could be a nightmare for some users and some inexperienced IT professionals. You may contact us – HelpDeskAssist.com to assist you in the migration process from the old hard drive to the new one.

Figure 1

Figure 2

(Images Coming Soon)

3. Defrag – Defrag – Defrag

I can’t stress enough the need to always perform a defrag on your PC. Windows – by design – has many flaws (hence the viruses, blue screens, crashes etc..) and one of the major downfalls of using this Operating System is the way it handles writing files to the hard drive. Windows has the tendency to split files and scatter them all over the place (Your hard drive) and when it needs the file again, it has to go to so many areas and locate what’s being requested – Think of it this way: This may sound silly but let’s say we have a deck of cards and I scatter them in a room and ask you to collect them. I’m sure it will take you a minute or two to find all the cards, arrange them and hand them back to me as opposed to me putting the cards down one after the other in an organized manner and asking you to do the same. It will take a quarter of the time to do what took you a couple of minutes before. That’s what MyDefrag attempts to do when you run it on your computer.

Defragmentation and Optimization Will Save You Money

By checking the option to run defrag on weekly basis, you in return have saved the harddrive from thousands upon thousands of excessive delayed and extended disk read / write operations hence less wear and tear on your hard drive. But be careful, excessive defragging and Optimizing can actually add to the wear and tear so setting this to weekly should be best practice in my opinion. Figure 1 is a screenshot of the main interface for this program.

Figure 1

(Images Coming Soon)

Tips:

1. To get the best out of this program I would make sure that you’ve closed EVERY program running including the icons to the left of the clock. In some scenarios I’ve actually used the Task Manager to end the tasks that I knew are not critical to the system and ran the defrag.

2. You can perform this in much more efficient way by restarting your computer, booting into safe mode (press F9 before the Windows Screen pops up) and selecting Safe Mode. Login to your user profile, make sure that no programs are running and run MyDefrag.

3. Other advanced ways in defragmenting and optimizing your hard drive can be done by setting your Swap file to Zero, restarting in Safe mode and performing the defrag. Don’t forget to reset the Swap file back to its original size or click “Let windows automatically choose …”