Defragmenting your hard drive: How to speed up your system

If your hard drive is noticeably losing speed, defragmentation can work wonders. This process cleans up the disk and helps it regain performance. Our guide shows you how to defragment your hard drive.

Over time, your hard drive accumulates a lot of leftover data that the system no longer needs. Moreover, gaps appear between the different data packages on the disk; these gaps usually cannot be used due to their small size, so you cannot use the full capacity of your hard disk. With a defragmentation you close these gaps.

How to defragment your hard disk with Windows on-board tools

Since previous Windows generations, Microsoft's operating system has been equipped with a tool for defragmentation. Whether in Windows XP, Windows 7 or Windows 10, you can find the tool as follows:

1. Open Windows Explorer by clicking on "Start" or pressing the key combination "Windows key" + "E".
2. Click on "My Computer" or on "Computer" (in Windows 10).
3. There you get an overview of your hard disk partitions. Right-click on the desired partition to select "Properties".
4. In the new window, switch to the "Tools" tab if you are using Windows 7 or 10 and to the "Tools" tab if your computer is using Windows XP.
5. Under "Optimize and defragment drive", click on the "Optimize" button (in Windows 7 and above) or select "Defragment now".

Your hard drive will now be defragmented. This process takes some time: we therefore recommend that you start the defragmentation when you do not need the computer at the moment anyway.Optionally, you can also rely on external software, such as Smart Defrag, which you can download from us for free. Also O&O Defrag 19 has proven to be an effective tool.