The excitement that was Black Friday has come and gone as have the two shopping days that followed and now many people are asking themselves if they are prepared to endure another month of such chaos. Surrounded by family and friends, hitting the stores in search of the perfect presents doesn’t seem so bad but now reality is beginning to settle in and if you choose to continue down that same shopping path those long lines and frustrating moments will likely greet you on each occasion.
As an alternative to such outings we now have the holiday convenience of shopping online and even this event has earned its official kickoff, Cyber Monday. Unlike the traditional insanity of Black Friday there is no need to camp outside of your favorite website waiting for it to open, you don’t have to walk around your house looking for an unoccupied chair in which to park yourself, and you don’t have to tote all those bags around your living room while browsing the Internet for more deals.
In essence, shopping online has become the perfect tool to keeping your sanity intact during the holiday season.
Of course there is a catch, and there always is. If you want online shopping to eliminate the traffic jams, crowded stores and countless lost hours associated with the traditional shopping then you need to have a healthy computer otherwise you’ll likely find yourself even more frustrated because what should be a convenience has turned into torture.
The first thing you should know about keeping your computer healthy is that it is within your ability to do so. As a matter of fact, keeping your computer’s performance at its highest level is actually easier than finding an open parking space at the mall and all it requires is a simple step, installing defragmentation software.
Those who are intimidated by their computer should fear not as installing defragmentation software requires little more than booting up your system and once you have installed defrag software you’ll see the difference almost immediately as you are reintroduced to the luxury of convenience.
Convenience for shoppers is almost always tied to speed and efficiency and during the holiday season these two attributes rank above almost all others in importance. Because installing defrag software restores your computer’s speed and affords you the ability to become more efficient it should be the first thing you do before starting your online shopping this year.
Losing speed and efficiency is a natural process due to fragmentation, a computer disease that attacks the manner in which your files are saved and stored. Because your hard drive places such an importance on free space it saves files one after the next and leaves no space between any two files. What this means is that as those saved files are recalled, modified and then resaved they will no longer fit in the space they were originally stores. To solve this problem your hard drive cuts the excess information and then stores it in the next available space, creating fragmented file.
What’s important to remember is that the files that are being saved and stored on your computer aren’t just the ones that you have created but also the temporary files that your computer is constantly saving. This is a major contributor to fragmentation and because there is no limit to how many times a file can be fragmented it is common to have hundreds if not thousands of pieces of a single file spread across the hard drive.
This mess is what slows down your computer, no different than if you walked into a clothing store during the holiday season and all the men’s, women’s, children’s and baby’s apparel was thrown on the floor and you just wanted to search the sweaters to find the perfect present for your mom. As you begin digging through the mess of men’s shoes, women’s dresses, children’s jackets, etc you may be able to find a few sweaters but this is a lengthy process and most would quickly abandon the whole search and leave the store.
Order is needed for convenience and its gift of speed and efficiency, this is why clothing stores have separate departments for men, women, etc. and these departments are further broken down by styles of clothing. Essentially this is what defragmentation software does for you; it takes that giant mess of files, no different than the pile of clothes, and resorts them and puts them in their proper space. Defrag repairs the broken files by piecing them back together and then storing them as a single unit, making them easier to find the next time you search for them.
So what does this have to do with your computer and online shopping this season? Really it has everything to do with it because fragmentation effects any action you take on your computer. Fragmented files slow every process down even if the file you are looking for hasn’t been fragmented into hundreds of pieces. The process of finding that file is difficult for your hard drive because it has to work its way through all the other fragmented files until it can get to the one you requested.
Defrag software like Diskeeper 2010 restores your computer performance back to its intended speed and efficiency, eliminating the hassles of fragmented files and ensuring they don’t return. To avoid the hassles of a messy online shopping season be sure to equip your computer with the tools necessary to remain fats and reliable, take a moment and install defragmentation software.
