When you purchase your new PC, it seems like a speed daemon. You wonder why it’s so fast. Does that new Core 2 Duo processor really make so much of a difference? Surely the new graphics card can’t make applications launch more quickly or your hard drive enable your system to boot more swiftly?

Well, yes, they do improve the speed of your system, but it’s the fact that you’ve installed Windows on a brand new hard drive that really makes the difference. You’d probably find, that after using your old PC for a year, that if you installed Windows from scratch, your system would be at least 25% quicker.

Part of the problem is down to the ongoing use of installing and removing software and moving files around your drive. The more you write/move files to and from your hard drive, the more your drive becomes fragmented. Parts of the files are located in different locations on your drive. When you drive then attempts to load an application or read a file, it takes a great deal longer as the drive has to access files from all over your drive, rather than from one continuous block.

The answer is to defragment your drive. This will move files in to one continuous block and rearrange the space so that it ends up located in one big block of space. It means your files and applications launch much more quickly.

The downside is that you have to defragment your drive and this can take ages. If you have a huge hard drive, you might need to leave the process running overnight.

IObit SmartDefrag is a free defragging tool and worth investigating. It’s also rather fast. However, remember that when you defragment your drive that it’s advisable not to be running applications at the same time.