For decades, desktop and laptop owners have been told to defragment their hard drives to get the best performance, especially on Windows-based PCs. Defragging reorganizes the drive so the operating ...

I've got a trial copy of version 6.5 of O&O defrag and I was wondering how to defrag locked files (like the MFT, pagefile, and hibernation file). In the help file, it says something about setting up a ...

Defragging a hard drive was once so common it was almost a rite of passage for computer users. Many different disk utility and maintenance programs offered defragmentation routines as part of their ...

File fragmentation is one of the constants of Microsoft’s, and other, operating systems. On a brand-new drive, the first files written are all written to contiguous parts of the drive, making for the ...

Although many users have heard the term “defragging a drive,” a surprising number don’t know why it’s necessary or how to do it. Fortunately, this built-in Microsoft Windows tool is small, effective ...

Dennis O'Reilly began writing about workplace technology as an editor for Ziff-Davis' Computer Select, back when CDs were new-fangled, and IBM's PC XT was wowing the crowds at Comdex. He spent more ...

In Windows 11, you can create multiple partitions on a hard drive. If a hard drive partition has more free space and you want to create a separate partition from that, you can do so by shrinking the ...

If you haven't been organizing and discarding files as you go, it's likely your hard drive is stuffed with downloads, unwanted photos, file copies and other digital dust bunnies. This can reveal ...

Close all programs so that you are at your desktop. Click on the Start button. This is the small round button with the Windows flag in the lower left corner. Click on the Control Panel menu option.

Your phones and computers hold more than you might realize. The files that you can view by default on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS are by no means everything that's stored on those systems. These ...

Disk Cleanup is another utility that is accessible regardless of your Windows version. The easiest way to open it is to search for "Disk Cleanup" in the search bar and bring up the window.