Should i defragment my laptop

One of these steps is defragmenting or defragging your hard drive. In this lesson, we'll show you the basics of defragging. This lesson will focus on Windows.

If you have a Mac, you won't need to defrag your hard drive. When you use your computer, you see each file as a single unit of information, but that's not how your computer treats it. Each file is actually an amalgam of segments that the computer puts together on demand. The process of restoring the file segments to a more centralized state is called defragmentation , and it's something you can and should perform on your computer periodically.

The question for many people is "How often? As you use your computer over time, file parts are scattered across your hard drive. When the scattering becomes widespread, your computer takes longer to grab the right bits to put together your files.

This process slows down your system's responsiveness. This can result in program errors. A common error in Photoshop—the Scratch Disk Full error — can be fixed by a simple defrag. If you're a normal user meaning you use your computer for occasional web browsing, email, games, and the like , defragmenting once a month should be fine. If you're a heavy user, meaning you use the PC eight hours a day for work, you should do it more often, approximately once every two weeks. Also, if your computer is running slowly , consider defragmenting, as fragmentation may be the cause of slower operation.

Any more feedback? The more you tell us the more we can help. Can you help us improve? Resolved my issue. Clear instructions. Easy to follow. No jargon. Pictures helped. Didn't match my screen. Defragmenting improves load times by reducing how frequently the hard drive has to seek data. Defragmenting a SSD will likely not improve performance and cause the drive to wear out faster.

SSDs, or flash hard drives, do not physically move a controller arm to read data stored on a physical disk and instead recall information stored on flash memory. Because of the way SSDs operate, the seek time becomes negligible, so a fragmented file won't make a difference. Additionally, many SSDs use algorithms that deliberately spread data over flash memory chips that only make sense to the SSD's controller.

Since the computer doesn't process the SSD data arrangement algorithms, the data is shuffled around and not actually defragmented.

Windows can run hard drive defragmentation in the background so that it's unnoticeable.