As far as gift-giving goes the 2010 holiday season was dominated by the online shopper as more and more people opted to forgo the hassles of the busy malls and turned to the Internet instead. With the ability to bounce from store to store without ever leaving the house online shopping has unquestionably become the favored method to quickly and conveniently purchase presents for the family and friends on your list. Unfortunately for some online shoppers the experience didn’t include “quickly and conveniently” but rather “slowly and frustrating.”
So what happened? It’s not as if these people got caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic along the Internet highway or stuck in long lines at the virtual mall. Well maybe they did. In some ways this is exactly what happened to the frustrated online shopper and it all has to do with a computer disease known as fragmentation.
To move from page to page and site to site with ease your computer needs to be in good health, something many people take for granted. It’s a common misconception that something as simple as anti-virus software will maintain your computer’s operability and keep things running smoothly but this is simply not true. As important as anti-virus software is in protecting and removing viruses, worms and trojan horses it does nothing to prevent or repair the damage caused by fragmentation.
Because fragmentation is a disease, not a virus, it essentially avoids detection and like any disease gets worse over time. Fragmentation is able to avoid anti-virus software detection simply because it is not introduced by something outside of your hard drive; it is born directly on the drive.
Think back to your online shopping experience and if you encountered problems booting up your system, sluggish Internet browsing, difficulty loading pages, trouble completing payments, etc. then chances are you’re dealing with a drive that has been overrun by fragmented files and even the best anti-virus software can’t solve that dilemma.
It’s important to understand that fragmentation is a naturally occurring disease that will develop on an unprotected drive and this is simply due to the manner in which drives are manufactured. Drives do everything they can to maintain as much free space as possible and as a result the method of saving and storing files can become a dangerous practice. As files are saved a drive places them one after the next with no room between any two files. When a file is recalled, modified, and then resaved it will no longer fit in the original space and the drive is forced to cut the excess information and store it in the next available space, this is now a fragmented file.
What does this have to do with your computer’s inability to move from site to site and operate efficiently? Everything. There is no limit to how many times a file can be fragmented, meaning it is common for hundreds if not thousands of pieces of a single file are scattered across a drive. Each time that file is recalled the drive is forced to embark on a taxing search for each of those pieces before it can deliver the request to the screen.
That file search can be just as long for a file that isn’t as heavily fragmented as others simply because the drive encounters so many fragmented pieces while doing its job, essentially roadblocks that cause that traffic jam. This is what’s responsible for that slowdown in operability and more often than not the source of your frustration. The longer it goes unresolved the worse the damage until eventually the drive crashes, wiping out everything that has been saved and stored.
The files that are saved and stored by an individual aren’t the only problem and what some people don’t realize is that their computer is actively creating temporary files for just about every action that is being undertaken. This means that everything that you do on your computer is compounding the problem of fragmentation.
For those online shoppers that found their Internet experience less than pleasing this holiday season then chances are they were using a computer that may be carrying a dangerous level of fragmented files. Fortunately this can be easily resolved but it requires action. Companies like Diskeeper have designed defragmentation software that will not only repair the fragmented files, joining the fragmented pieces and saving them in one spot, but also protect the drive from any return of fragmentation. By installing defragmentation software on the drive you’ll instantly have a faster and more reliable computer.
In addition to being faster and more reliable, a defragmented hard drive will also have a longer life span because it is no longer forced to work harder than necessary, making defragmentation software a must-have for any computer owner.
Defrag software really is a must-have because fragmentation is going to exist and persist on an unprotected drive. There is no way around fragmentation other than facing it head on with defragmentation software and taking care of the disease. The sooner you install defrag software the better off your drive will be and knowing that you’ll have to do it eventually should be reason enough to do it now.
You still have a few days left to shop; why not pick up the real “must-have” gift of the year, defragmentation software.
