• Defragment each of your hard drives to speed up read times

Defragmenting is kind of like a closet with hangers. For this analogy, lets say that you always wear the same clothes together, i.e. one pair of trousers is only ever worn with a specific shirt and a specific sweater. Lets also assume you have one of those huge mechanical closets that you press a button and all the hangers move in a circle. The hangars are attached, so you cant take a hanger off and move it to a different place.

First lets say your closet is unorganized. You simply put clothes in wherever there is a spare hanger. When you want a specific outfit, you would have to start at one point, push the move button, and scan till you got to the jeans. Next you would have to press the button again and wait till it scanned to the shirt you wanted. Next you would have to again scan till the sweater you wanted is in front of you.

As you can tell there is a much more efficent way of doing things. Lets say you have an hour on the weekend free, so you went through your entire closet and swapped clothes so that all of your outfits were together. The jeans, the shirt, and the sweater for each outfit were right next to each other. This would take some time, but the benefit is that every day for the next few weeks, you simply had to scan to the location of the entire outfit. With one hand you then grab the entire outfit, no scanning, stopping, scanning, stopping, etc.

Files on a hard drive are like outfits. They are be broken up and put wherever there is space. This is called fragmenting, and is neccessary because when a file is written there is not time to shuffle everything around so it can all go together (your hard drive may be written to thousands of times a second). Defragmenting does take quite a bit of time (sometimes hours), but if you leave it and let it do it while you are not at the computer, when you get back, your computer will be able to access files much faster, as it wont have to look in multiple places for each single file.

Windows comes with a Defragmenter, however the built in defragmenter is limited in its abilities. It is unable to defragment a large number of the System files. This is bad because the system files are some of the worst offenders when it comes to slowing the computer down. Power Defragmenter is a program designed to defragment the files, ALL of them including the system files.

Power Defragmenter is simply 2 files, there is nothing to "install". To get the "Power Defragmenter GUI", click here. If it asks you to open or save, click "Open". The zip file will download and open.

When the zip file opens, drag the Power Defragmenter Icon to the desktop (you may have to minimize other open windows). Do not run it yet, as you need to next download the second part of the progrem, Contig.

To download Contig, Click Here and scroll down to the bottom. Click "Download Contig". Again click "Open" when asked. When the zip file opens, drag the contig file to the desktop.

To defragment your hard drive, double click the Power Defragmenter file on your desktop. Click "Next", then select "PowerMode(TM) Disk Defragmentation", and click next. Select the hard drive you want to defragment (usually c:, repeat the steps after if you have other drives) and click "defragment".

A black console screen will show up, this is the contig program doing its stuff. After a while (minutes up to hours), the contig console will read out the "Analysis Report", and tell you how much defragmentation remains (if the hard drive is too full, you cant defragment it all in one pass). If the final percent defragmentation is higher than a few percent, you may want to consider deleting unneccessary large files or removing unneeded programs using add/remove and then running a powermode scan again.

Next >> Start at the Beginning and go through all the steps!