Simple Computer Tune-up: Speed Up Your PC- P16 ppt

Figure 6-17: Emptying the Recycle BinCheck for Hard Drive Errors Data in hard drives can become corrupt, such as from power surges and improper shutdowns, which can cause disk errors.. T

Figure 6-17: Emptying the Recycle Bin

Check for Hard Drive Errors

Data in hard drives can become corrupt, such as from power surges and improper shutdowns, which can cause disk errors Typically, these are errors that won’t be noticeable to the PC user; therefore you should perform a hard drive scan at least once a month

Here is how to check your hard drive for errors (and fix it) using Windows XP:

1. Open My Computer

2. Right-click the disk you would like to check (for instance, the C drive) and click Properties Figure 6-18 shows an example

Figure 6-18: Accessing drive properties

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Figure 6-19: Accessing the Check Disk utility

5. It’s recommended to mark both check disk options, Automatically Fix File System Errors and Scan for and Attempt Recovery of Bad Sectors, to ensure any disk errors are properly addressed See Figure 6-20 for an example

Figure 6-20: Marking the Check Disk options

6. Click Start

If the hard drive is currently in use, which will likely be the case, a pop-up message will appear, such as Figure 6-21 shows

Click Yes to schedule the scan for the next restart, or to cancel the scan, click No

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Figure 6-21: Pop-up message

Defragment the Hard Drive

Defragmenting your hard drive optimizes it by reorganizing files that are scattered around the disk drive Moving this information into contiguous clusters allows for faster retrieval of files and results in

an increase of overall system performance

Fragmentation worsens the more you install, uninstall, move, and delete files on your hard drive However, hard drive fragmentation

is common and occurs naturally

The amount of time that defragmentation takes depends on several factors, including the following:

• Amount of fragmentation

• Size of the hard drive

• Number and size of files on the hard drive

• Performance of your PC You can get an idea of the amount of fragmented files and folders before performing a defragmentation by analyzing the hard drive first This allows you to better decide whether you would benefit from defragmenting the hard drive

Note

In order to analyze or defragment your hard drive your PC has to

be logged on a Windows account with administrative privileges

If you are not sure whether you are, you can check:

1.Open the Control Panel, as seen in Figure 6-22

continued

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Figure 6-22:Opening the Control Panel

If the Start menu is in classic look, the Control Panel is under Settings on the menu

2.Open User Accounts, as Figure 6-23 shows when in cate-gory view

Figure 6-23:Opening the User Accounts utility

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3.Look for your user account and see if it belongs to the administrators group, such as identified in Figure 6-24

Figure 6-24:Checking for administrative privileges

Before performing the defragmentation you should first analyze the hard drive to get a feeling of the amount of fragmented files and folders on your hard drive

Here is how to analyze your hard drive using Windows XP:

1. Open Disk Defragmenter, which can be accessed by brows-ing to the followbrows-ing path on your Start menu:

• Start

• Programs (or All Programs)

• Accessories

• System Tools Then click Disk Defragmenter, as shown in Figure 6-25

2. Click Analyze, as shown in Figure 6-26

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