Beat Those Crawling PC Blues

Since prevention is better than cure, the first step is minimising the fragmentation. Eventually, fragmentation can’t be avoided. Once you start running out of space, new data is bound to get split up when stored on the disk. But yes, you can optimise the system such that this happens not so often. Believe it or not, the moves you make even before you install the Operating System such as Windows 2000 or XP makes a big difference.

Partitioning the hard drive is the first step. It’s always recommended to install the OS and all programs in a separate partition and create others on the disk according to the usage. If you’re looking at Windows XP, then the partition size should be between 10-15 GB, depending on the number of programs you intend on installing. Then if you have a lot of music and videos, keep those in another partition. How this helps is simple--fragmentation on one partition will not affect the performance of another.

Despite the fact that the drive where you’ve saved all the multimedia might be heavily used and highly fragmented, the Windows OS on the whole will continue to run smoothly, along with the other programs installed.

If your OS is already installed, don’t fret; you can still go about making changes if you feel
the need to do so. Visit www.acronis.com and download the Disk Director Suite version 10.
This program suite comes with very handy system management tools like a partition manager with which you can create, delete, split, merge and resize the partitions on the hard drive. Then there’s a recovery tool that can restore partitions that have been deleted by mistake. This ought to be a must have tool on any computer system and will be useful for both novices and enthusiasts.

Next in line, get hold of a couple of backup tools like Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image. Both of these programs perform a similar function, that is, cloning a partition. This is how it works: The most tedious part about reinstalling an operating system is, having to configure your settings all over again, reinstalling all the software and backing up the files. This is the biggest reason why most computer users are turned off at the very thought of it.

Ghost and True Image work by taking a snapshot of the partition, which is called an image. So if you created an image of your Windows partition, and you had to reinstall the OS, all you have to do is fire up the program (Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image) and reload the image. It would be as if you were t r a n s p o r t e d back in time, back to the point when you created the image. So much for that virus or spyware, which tried to render your machine non-operational.

Finally, defragment your system! You can either use Windows’ built-in defragmenting tool that’ll do a decent job or you can download specialised software such as O&O Defrag or Raxco PerfectDisk.

The advantage that these programs have over Window’s default defragmenter is that they do a much more thorough job of reorganising the data. O&O Defrag, for instance, has several modes. One of the modes defragments in the background as you work, thus using minimal resources.
To summarise what’s mentioned above, start by creating correct partitions according to your usage. Then install the OS of your choice along with the programs you need.

After that, create an image of the partition using any of the tools mentioned above. The image will help you restore your machine to that initial state if need be.