Defragmenting Your Hard Disk


The direct link to this post is https://modthesims.info/showthread.php?p=826563
The direct link to this thread is https://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=35914


Explanation

Short version: Defragmenting your hard drive means all the files on the drive are pushed to the start of the drive and de-fragmented.

Long version: When you save a file to your hard drive what happens is a little chunk of the drive is allocated to this file.
Now, lets say you save 3 files, each of them 1,000,000 characters long.
So you have file A at the start, file B after it and file C after that. Now lets say you delete file B, what you have is file A at the start, a gap of 1,000,000 characters, and file C at the end. If you then save a file that is 1,500,000 characters long, the first 1,000,000 will go into the gap file B used to be in, and the other 500,000 will go after file C. That would be a fragmented file because it's in two blocks.

Disk defragmenter rounds up all the fragments of each file and puts it into one long block. Think of it as reading a book. If the pages were in 1, 2, 3... order it would be easy to read, but if they were in random order 1, 57, 31, 6, 3, 62... then you would read one page then have to search for the next one. That's what a hard drive has to do with fragmented files. Disk Defragmenter puts the pages in order.

The distinct advantage of this is it takes a lot less time to read a file with 1 fragment than with 100 fragments so as you can imagine, if you have a lot of fragmented files it will take a lot longer to work with them. Windows should boot a little faster, games, especially big games like The Sims 2, should load quicker too.


Defragmenting

Click the Start Menu... All Programs... Accessories... System Tools... Disk Defragmenter.

Click the Defrag button.

That's it! If it's the first time you've defragmented it will take a while, possibly upwards of an hour. Subsequent defrags shouldn't take too long and defrag should generally be run weekly.