Your Internet is moving slowly. It happens. Chances are if you’ve called your ISP you’ve sat on hold for a long time listening to bad music. You don’t want to do that, believe me I did over the phone tech support for over 5 years. So you reach into your bag of tricks and you decide to do something yourself. The one thing that many people do is to defrag your computer. This has been a feature for a long time, which is why you know about it. Don’t waste your time doing this though.
Defragmenting your computer does nothing to speed up your internet connection. When you create a file on your computer it takes up space in the computer’s memory. When you add to the file new space has to be allocated. When you delete that file that space is now opened back up. After years of use your computer’s memory has all kinds of openings in it that data can be written to but a lot of holes that are open but just not big enough to hold that latest movie or song you’ve downloaded. That is where defragmenting comes in. It takes all of those files and memory spaces and groups them all together, thereby freeing up hard drive space.
With today’s computers and hard drives that now have capacity in the terabytes defragmenting is not really necessary anymore. For many of you that one terabyte hard drive is more space than you’ll ever be able to use. It was a much more useful tool when hard drives were measured by the megabyte and space was much more valuable but defragmenting your computer does nothing for your internet connection! Don’t waste your time.
Think about it this way. Take some loose change and lay it in a row in front of you. Each coin takes up a different amount of space. As you take some of those coins out to spend them and replace them with new coins they may not fit exactly. Sure that dime could fit easily into the spot vacated by a quarter with room left over but nothing else will fit in that extra room. That quarter that you are moving in can’t fit in the spot vacated by a nickel so it has to be placed at the end. After doing this a few times there is probably all kinds of empty spaces. As your desk beings to become cluttered you now decide to move them all together to free up those small spaces. That is what defragging does.