Without a doubt today’s home PC is faster than ever, so much so that even the slowest brand new computer of today has more horsepower under its hood than all the computing power combined together that was used in running the Apollo Moon Mission! Whenever you use your computer, file pieces or file fragments are formed which eventually become dislodged and misplaced from one another. This process of fragmentation occurs because of the continuous and ongoing activity of the addition and the deletion of files on your hard drive whenever your computer is performing a task. Fragmentation ultimately reduces computer performance because processing resources must be allocated to what in effect becomes a seek-n-find operation. Basically when a file is fragmented the computer must search the entire hard disk any time that file is opened in order to piece together all the various fragments of that file to make it complete. As you can imagine this is a time consuming and labor intensive process that makes a computer run slow and forces it to run and perform in a sluggish manner. Defragmentation Defragmentation is the process whereby the various different parts of a file are arranged in a contiguous fashion so that the file fragments connect to one another in sequential order until the file is a complete unit once more. Arranging files in this manner speeds up an otherwise slow computer because now that the file fragments are arranged to form a whole the computer can access and retrieve that file so much faster from its hard drive or whichever disk has just been defragmented. Defragmenting In Progress The image above shows a horribly defragmented hard drive which is illustrated by the extensive amount of red color in the image above which signifies low performing files and folders. In this example the tool used to reassemble my computer files and thus ultimately speed up my slow computer is Diskeeper Professional Pro. Diskeeper 2007 Pro does not initially ship with a new computer, instead what you get is a watered down version of Diskeeper which though somewhat limited is better than nothing. (Later on I’ll explain why I describe the version of Diskeeper that ships with a new computer as watered down). Activating Windows Disk Defragment Tool Getting to the inbuilt Windows defragment tool is quite easy as shown in the image above. All you do is click on Start then go to Programs, find the Accessories tab (click on that) head to Systems Tools and finally you’ll get to the defragment tool. In this case the shipped default basic Diskeeper defragment tool has integrated with my purchased copy of Diskeeper 2007 Professional that is why when I access the tool it reads Diskeeper Disk Defragmenter. Normally the default tool will merely state Disk Defragmenter. Whether you are using a third party disk defragmenter or the Windows inbuilt default tool, the process of basic defragging is pretty much the same and couldn’t be simpler. Just choose whichever drive you wish to defragment (assuming you have more than 1 drive) then click “Defragment”. I usually don’t bother to click the “Analyze” button since the defragmenter tool automatically goes through the process of analyzing before defragging anyway. Windows XP Paging File There is a hidden file on your computer called the Pagefile.sys which together with the physical amount of RAM installed on your system makes up the Virtual Memory: Paging file + Physical RAM = Virtual Memory The paging file is really a relic of the past and its purpose was to boost the amount of actual physical RAM available on any given computer system. You see back in the day when computers were equipped with a “whopping” 64–128 megabytes (MB) of RAM, as software applications became more advanced and at the same time more resource hungry, an alternative means was needed to accommodate the required amount of RAM, until such time that hardware manufactures caught up and produced greater capacity modules of RAM. RAM, by the way stands for, Random Access Memory and is a hardware component found in your computer as memory modules. The image below shows what the RAM memory modules look like: Image Depicting Memory Modules Arranged On Motherboard These days however, RAM really isn’t too much of an issue especially on high-end systems that can easily accommodate 16G or more of RAM. Having said that though, for the average PC owner the prudent management of RAM is still an issue, especially when one takes into account such factors as insatiable operating systems like Windows Vista (need a minimum of 1.5 gigabytes of RAM for Vista to perform at a basic tolerable level) and other resource ravenous software that is the norm of today. Anyway back to that dinosaur of yesteryear known as the Paging File; for some reason or other Windows by default still allocates a figure of 1.5 times the physical amount of RAM to the Paging File. In other words: Physical RAM x 1.5 = Paging File (Virtual Memory) So in a system such as mine which has 4 gigs of physical RAM installed, the Paging File would take up a shattering 6 gigs of RAM! And that is not the only problem related to the Paging File here’s the kicker: By Default The Paging File Cannot Be Defragmented! The Paging File despite its designation of “virtual memory” is nothing more than reserved hard drive space to which data is written to and retrieved periodically. By default the paging file is stored on the boot partition of windows which means that the paging file is housed in that portion of Windows that contains the operating system and its respective support folders. There are 2 big problems with this scenario: 1. When the Paging File and Operating System are located on the same drive partition simultaneous access to both systems is impossible and access to the one must by necessity await completion of access to the other. This process naturally makes your computer very slow. Luckily though there is a way round this bottle-neck situation; by moving the Paging File to a different partition Windows will then be able to handle I/O (input/output) requests faster because the relocation of the Paging File ensures a less competitive environment for reading and writing requests. However do note though that if you completely move the Paging File from the boot partition Windows will be unable to create a dump file (Memory.dmp) with which to write debugging information when a kernel mode Stop Error message occurs. The way to bypass such an eventuality is to create a paging file that is stored on the boot partition and another paging file that is located on a separate partition. Windows by design will access the paging file located on the non-boot partition first before looking to the paging file housed on the boot partition. Okay let’s see how to go about the business of relocating the paging file: Follow the directions outlined in the following images to se how to access the Paging File on your computer. My Operating System is Windows XP so I cannot vouch if this method is the same for other Windows OS systems; however I do not see why they would have changed the procedure for Vista so in all likelihood it is probably the same. But as you can see this is a rather complicated and laborious method to fix a slow computer, surely there must be an easier and quicker way? Well actually thankfully there is. Click the following link to find out how to speed up a slow running computer quickly and easily. Article on how to fix slow computer written by ba Kiwanuka