By John Woram
(November 19, 2004)

Do you see your dentist regularly? Change your car's oil every 3,000 miles? Defragment your hard drive? Well, two out of three ain't bad, but if your PC isn't the speedster it used to be, chances are a bloated hard drive is to blame. Steer clear of PC bottlenecks by making the most of Windows' built-in maintenance tools. Just mouse over to your System Tools folder and get ready to fine-tune your PC.

Get your hard drive back in the fast lane

Before you get started with this project, we recommend that you have the following:

Get your hard drive back in the fast lane

The first bit of prep work is to examine your hard drive for file-system errors and bad sectors--areas where writing and reading data may be a problem. Open My Computer, right-click any drive, and select Properties. Click the Tools tab, and in the Error-checking section, click Check Now. Check one or both boxes and click Start. If you have more than one partition--or more than one hard drive--you'll have to repeat the process for each one, because Windows XP scans only one drive at a time. If you're prompted to schedule the disk check the next time you start your computer, click Yes and reboot. Or reboot later, if you prefer.

Either way, the utility performs the selected operations.

Get your hard drive back in the fast lane

How much stuff sits on your hard drive? If it's like ours, you have many files of dubious virtue loitering in every nook and cranny--temporary Internet files, downloaded program files, and the like. To get an idea of how much space you're wasting, go to Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup, and Windows will calculate how much space you can free up by performing this step. When it's finished, you'll see a list of file types with checks next to the ones Windows proposes sending off to the bit bucket, along with the space occupied by each category and the total amount of space you can reclaim if you let Disk Cleanup erase each checked category.

To see what's in the files Windows wants to delete, highlight one of the categories and select View Files. If the figure represents a negligible percentage of total disk space and you're not sure you really want to dump anything, forget about a cleanup at this time. Or, open the Recycle Bin and sort its contents by date. Highlight anything older than, say, one month, and delete just the highlighted files.

Get your hard drive back in the fast lane

The first few steps haven't done much to improve performance, but they have prepared your hard drive for the defragmentation procedure. As you create, delete, and modify files on your computer, over time the files become divided into pieces scattered around the disk. This slows things down because your hard drive has to search the disk to find the parts of a single file. The defragmentation procedure gathers all the pieces of a file and rewrites its data into contiguous, sequential sectors. As a result, the read/write head doesn't need to waste time scooting all over the drive to find each piece of a file.

Keep in mind, the defragmentation process could take hours, so it's best to let it run overnight. Select Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter. With a drive highlighted, click Analyze to see how badly fragmented your files are. The blue lines represent contiguous files. If you see a lot of thin blue lines scattered throughout the display field, you could benefit from a defrag. (You should also see a dialog that says "You should defragment this volume.") Just click Defragment to get started. Once that drive is done, try another drive letter. If the operation isn't necessary, you'll get a message reading, "You do not need to defragment this volume." (Volume is Microsoft-speak for the drive partition that was just analyzed.)

For a no-holds-barred way to speed up your system, consider a fresh install of Windows. Just make sure you create a thorough backup of everything first.

Get your hard drive back in the fast lane

Once the defrag is complete, your system should run a little faster. If you want to eke just a little more speed out of the ol' beige mare, consider moving your swap, or paging, file to another partition. Also known as virtual memory, the swap file extends your PC's memory, holding information from real RAM on your hard drive as you work. By default, this file is written to drive C:, but you can improve performance and increase free space by moving it to a different partition. Right-click My Computer and select Properties > Advanced. In the Performance section, click Settings > Advanced and in the Virtual Memory section, click Change. Next to drive C:, the two numbers in the Paging File Size (MB) column indicate the minimum and maximum size limits of the current file.

To set up a new paging file on a different drive, highlight that drive letter and click either the Custom Size or System Managed Size radio button. The Custom Size button lets you specify the desired size. (Two to three times the size of your RAM is a good starting point.) If space is plentiful, set the initial and maximum sizes to the same value so that Windows doesn't have to dynamically adjust the file size. Or choose System Managed Size to let Windows do the job on its own.

Once you've configured the new swap file, click Set, then highlight drive C:. Click No Paging File to delete the old file on that drive and click Set again.