Defragment can do much more than win you a triple word score in your next friendly Scrabble game.  All Microsoft Windows based computers come bundled with an often forgotten utility tucked away in the accessories group of your start menu.

    Defragmenting your computer's hard drive is the equivalent to organizing all of the books you own in alphabetical order.  Imagine for a second that you, your friends and family members were borrowing books from your vast collection, and when returning them they just tossed them in any available opening.  Over time your books would be out of order, making it very time consuming to find that novel you're looking to grab on your way out the door.

    Recently it dawned on me, if computers are so smart why can't they clean up after themselves? Why do we need to run the "Disk Defragmenter" utility in the first place?  Well, Computers were designed to take care of a users immediate task as fast as possible without any concern for tidiness. It generally takes a computer longer to save a document in an efficient manner on your hard drive specifically for quick retrieval later. Operating systems such as Windows work this way by design. Windows may store a small file in a spot that can hold quite a large file and may also split a large file up into many smaller file chunks and store them in the first openings it finds on your hard drive, simply because it is quicker to do it that way. Thinking back to your bookshelf, it would make for a very time consuming task if you had to locate several sections of a book and scotch tape them back together before you could start reading.

The good news is Windows 7 and Vista are usually setup to periodically run Disk Defragmenter for you. If you are still using the Windows XP family of operating systems this by default is a manual task. Windows Disk Defragmenter ideally should be run on a weekly basis to ensure optimal speeds and a great user experience.