Before Defragmentation - Some Tips to Speed Up

Defragmentation is a necessary evil. You can't escape from it. How much you dislike the fact that you need to getaway from your computer while some other program has completely overtaken its activities. Upto the point you can't even play music.

You can play music if your music files are on some other partition other than which you are currently defragmenting. But it will certainly degrade performance.

Execute the following steps before starting disk defragmentation. It will save lots of time.

1) Empty Recycle Bin
2) Empty Recent Files Folder
3) Empty Temp Folder
4) Empty Temporary Internet Files Folder
5) Move all big files to some other partition which you don't use frequently. For example I move my Downloads folder because all it contains is setup programs. Which do not required access once the program is installed.

On Windows 9X folders 2-4 can be found in C:\Windows and on 2000 and XP they are in C:\Document and Settings\%LOGIN_NAME%

Where %LOGIN_NAME% is your login.

If you had never done the above you will be surprised by the speed gain.