In most cases businesses tend to take their computer network for granted. We just assume that when we arrive to work we’ll be able to push the start button, log on to our computer and, begin the day. Despite knowing that much of our business’s information has been stored on our computers there appears to be an overriding negligent attitude towards ensuring that these computers are maintained properly.
For the most part we don’t think about the reliability of our computers until something goes wrong and even then we hold out a blind faith that somehow they will right themselves. We’ve all tried to reboot a slow computer or shut an application that is taking too long to load in hopes that it will somehow improve the speed of the computer. Nobody ever said it would work yet it’s exactly what we try to do, for no other reason other than it makes us feel as if we’ve tried everything.
There isn’t a successful business operating today that takes that same approach with other areas of their company. It would be like a company reviewing financial records and noticing that they had been over budget for the quarter yet instead of looking at areas where they could cut costs or improve productivity they simply looked at the financial records the next day believing that they might have magically changed.
The reality of the situation is that over time our computers may slow down and show signs of drag. While that may be the lifecycle of a computer there is good news for those who would rather invest their time in practical and proven methods of correcting the problem rather than grasping a rabbit’s foot and offering up prayers.
More often than not, when we experience a computer reliability problem that involves speed it can be attributed to fragmentation. Sure fire signs of fragmentation on your computer’s hard drive are most often indicated by a lengthy boot time, long delays in loading applications and difficulty retrieving documents. Fortunately, a fragmented hard drive does not have to mean the end of your computer’s life.
Your computer’s processing time is slowed due to fragmentation, meaning that how your files are saved on your hard drive will determine how fast your computer responds to your requests. All computers store saved information inside a designated “block” on its hard drive. These blocks have a limited amount of space in which files can be stored and when that block is full your computer moves on to another block to save information.
Problems begin to surface when you retrieve a file from a block and make changes. When you re-save that file it no longer fits inside that same space in the block and your computer is forced to cut the added size of the file and store it in another block, now you have a fragmented file. The next time you try to retrieve that file your computer has to search the hard drive for all the information that goes with it. This causes the delay and over time it only gets worse.
The solution to your computer’s speed problem can often be found in defragmentation software. Commonly referred to as defrag, this software works to counter the causes that lead to fragmentation and restore your computer back to optimal speed. Installing defragmentation software will repair your fragmented files and create larger blocks on your hard drive to keep your files together. By cleaning your hard drive of fragmented files the speed of your computer will improve significantly and you won’t have to worry about carrying that rabbit’s foot with you to work.
