Before you start
Objectives: familiarize yourself on how to enable, configure and use Disk Defragmentation tool in Windows 7.
Prerequisites: you have to know what is disk fragmentation.
Key terms: disk, defragmentation, defragmenter, disks, tool, defrag, fragmented, button, click, run
Disk Defrag Tool
To open Defragmenter tool we can right-click our volume (E in our case), select Properties, go to Tools tab, and then click on the “Defragment now” button.
Tools Tab
On the Disk Defragmenter tool we will see all our disk and when the last defragmentation was run.
Disk Defragmenter
As we can see, the scheduled defragmentation is enabled by default and it will run at 1:00 AM every Wednesday. We can also modify that schedule. If we click the “Analyse disk” button, the system will check the disk and tell us if we need to defrag our disk or not. Notice that our disks are barely fragmented (C: drive is only 2% fragmented), which is great and we don’t need to run defragmenter in our case. To defrag the disk we can simply select it from the list and click on the “Defragment disk” button. Defragmentation can take a very short time if the fragmenation is small or it can take up to several hours if the disk is big and badly fragmented.
Remember that some files, like certain system can’t be moved during the defragmentation process. Also, network drives cannot be defragmented. By default, Windows 7 defragments our disks automatically. We can also use defrag command in command line to defragment our disks.