How often can you do the defragmentation on the computer?

Question

I know two guys, each one is very good with the computers but for this one they have different opinions.
One said to me that is very good to defragmenter the computer maybe once every week.
The other one said that is not good...you should do it only once every 6 months.
Now what do you guys think? Which is better ???

Answer 1

they are both right
if you are in the habit of installing and deleting lots of programs often then you should defrag more often
but if this is not the case then it is not nessesary and doing so puts un-needed strain on the hard drive
when starting the Windows defrag program you are given the option to Analyze after words it will say whether or not you need to defrag

Answer 2

You can run it all day everyday if you wanted but that would knock performance of your PC down to a crawl. There are professional disk defragmentation utilities like "Diskeeper" that defragment on the fly while your working so you won't have to defragment every other period. If your using the built-in defragmenter that Microsoft put in Windows, I'd recommend once per week but don't expect performance to skyrocket with that type of defragmentation--it wasn't built for that... thats what "Diskeeper" is for.

Answer 3

If you want to wear the drive out, defrag every day. It is a mechanical device and is prone to failure from being abused.

Having said that, I know of people who have NEVER defragged. Once every couple of months is fine. Once you have your programs installed you rarely need to do this unless you frequently burn CDs/DVDs. Even then, a lot of burner programs will let you designate an auxiliary drive (or other partition) as the temporary workspace.

Just take care of the computer. Most people don't bother to do the basics to take care of an investment worth $1000 ...

Answer 4

How about this : It's good to defrag your computer when you need to! Ha ha ha! I mean really, it depends on how you use your computer and thusly how fragmented you make it.

Taking long breaks between defrags will make your defrags run very long and painfully...defragging more often will help ensure your computuer runs fast and efficiently.

If you ran it once a month before you went to sleep, you'd be fine. But don't worry too much about how often you do it, just make sure you do it!

Answer 5

In regards to how often you can do it everyday if you want to. It's not going to hurt your computer. Think of your computer like a filing cabinet. Defrag organizes your filing cabinet. It basically puts all the a's with the a's and helps find the extra space that's being hidden by other files. I would be on the side of your six month friend. Think about how long it normally takes to get your filing cabinet all out of wack and you need to organize it. Or anything in general that you have to organize.

Answer 6

Once a week is usually the way to go. I don't remember the last time I did do a defrag lol probably ages ago

Answer 7

Depending on what kind of stuff you put into your computer. If you upload music, save new files and add other stuff that likes to take up a lot of space then do it after you are done. I do it every other day or every three days but that is because I add a lot of new files to my computer.

Answer 8

I would side more with the once per week. Unless your use of the computer is to login and read 10 emails a day, then once per 6 months would be plenty adequate.

Answer 9

you can defrag as often as you like but there is no need to do it more than about once a month