Difference Between Disk Clean up and Disk Defragmenter

Computer users always want to keep their computers in tip-top shape so that they would encounter fewer problems and experience an optimized performance from their devices. One of the few parts that you can maintain yourself is the hard disk drive of your computer, where all your files reside. The operating system also gives you the tools to combat the conditions that degrade the performance of your drive and the whole computer along with it.

The first of these tools is Disk Clean-up. This tool helps you by freeing up more disk space so that you can use it. Most programs don’t clean up too well after itself, leaving files that are no longer used and are just taking up disk space. It is the job of Disk Clean-up to track all these files along with a few other possible options you can take to free up more space. Disk Clean-up would also check the trash bin and old restore files that you may not need. It does ask you for a confirmation before deleting these files to make sure that you wouldn’t need them anymore.

The second tool is the Disk Defragmenter. As you use your computer you create files and delete files as well. These create unused spaces in between used spaces. Whenever you save a large file, sometimes there is no continuous area to put it and your system is forced to cut the files into smaller sections in order to be able to save it properly. This is called fragmentation, and the longer you use your computer the worse it gets. Fragmentation degrades the overall performance of your computer since reading a fragmented file would take longer.

The Disk Defragmenter helps you by examining the files and trying to plan out the locations of each and every file and which files cannot be modified. Once it has done that, it would then try to relocate all of the files that it can move so that every file would occupy a single continuous space to help speed up reading processes in the future. It is not a full proof operation though since some files that are being used by the system cannot be moved.

The Disk Clean-up and Disk Defragmenter are the two tools that you can use to keep your disk drive working efficiently. The effects of a single use would diminish after sometime, so you should regularly run these programs to make sure that your computer is in the best shape possible.

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