What is Defrag and how does one run it?

Answer 1

For Windows XP

Begin by first clicking on the Start Button.

Then move your mouse over the All Programs icon to display all Start Menu folders.

If your Start Menu is set to the Classic View, move your mouse over the Programs folder instead.

Now, move your mouse onto the Accessories menu folder until it expands.

Then move your mouse onto the System Tools menu folder until it expands.

Now Click on the Disk Defragmenter icon to launch the program.

Then use your mouse to highlight the drive that you want to Defragment?

Then click on the Defragment button located on the lower left hand center of the screen.

Windows XP will analyze your drive first and then display a visual estimate of the final results.

And Windows XP will continually show you a progress indicator bar depicting its progress.

When Windows is finished it will ask you if you would like to quit the Defrag Program.

Select YES to quit the Disk Defragmenter Program and then reboot your computer.


Microsoft provided us with a utility to organize the sequential layout of our files on our hard drive. As we either add or remove programs from our computer, doing so can cause our files and programs to scatter themselves all over our disk drive. Then when we try to launch a program, our hard drive has to work much harder by searching many different areas of our drive in order to get that program to load for us. And this of course hinders our computer’s performance. So Microsoft’s Disk Defragmenter program addresses this issue by organizing all our programs and files on our hard disk in a sequential easy to search layout. This technical brief will show you how to organize the files on your hard drive.

Answer 2

Defrag or Disk Defragmenter is a program included with most versions of the MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows operating systems starting from MS-DOS 6.0 (1993). Defrag.exe defragments a file system in a hard drive.
Defragmentation has been part of disk optimization since disk optimization stabilized in 1975. Few, other than Norton (Symantec) and Microsoft, have shipped defragmentation programs separate from disk optimization methods.
MS-DOS up to version 5 and Windows NT through version 4 did not come with a defragmentation utility.

In the MS-DOS world there were several after-market disk optimizers. The most famous, the Microsoft Defrag utility (licensed from Symantec, makers of the Norton Utilities) only did defragmentation. Microsoft's Defrag was criticised as being slow and using memory inefficiently. Norton's Speed Disk was much better (with more organizational options, and a 30% speed improvement). A shareware program called Disk Organizer was faster than most other programs and became quite popular for several years.

When Defrag was shipped for free with MS-DOS 6.0, the use of the alternative commercial products became less frequent, because customers were unable to justify the additional expense.

Windows 2000 and Windows XP include a stripped-down licensed version of Diskeeper Corporation's, (formerly Executive Software), Diskeeper.

Answer 3

Your hard disk is divided into sectors. Every file takes up at least one sector; larger files take more than one. Under certain circumstances, it is possible for one file to be fragmented, or split between sectors that are not adjacent to each other. If too many files are fragmented, hard disk performance deteriorates, since it takes more time to get between sectors that are far apart on the disk. In this situation, you can run a defragmentation ("defrag") utility to consolidate files in contiguous areas of the disk and thus improve performance.

How you run a defragmentation utility varies considerably with the operating system and the particular program that you're using.

Answer 4

Defrag, also called defragmentation, is a program that re-arranges your files to take up less space on your hard drive. It basically makes your computer run faster. You can access it by going into your start menu, then All Programs, Accessories, then System Tools, and then click on Disk Defragmenter. :)

Answer 5

Defragment is one of the system tools to keep the computer running more smoothly. It consolidates the files on the disks. click start-all programs-accessories-system tools-defragment. then follow onscreen instructions. The disk cleanup is also in the same area and will clear unnecessary files from the disk. I was told to do disk cleanup and defragment regularily to keep my computer running optimally.