I have asked this before and did not get to solid of an answer. I have windows xp andthe defrag does not look like the old one. I am not sure how often to do this as before they said about once a week.

Unless you are really doing a lot of disk-intensive stuff on your computer, I doubt you will need to defrag the hard drives more than monthly, if that. With Windows XP, the defrag tool will tell you whether or not it is actually necessary to defrag the drive. Your best bet is to manually run it to scan the drive periodically and defrag if it says you need to.

-Jeff

Ditto with JeffG, and more like once every 3-4 months.

With Windows XP, the defrag tool will tell you whether or not it is actually necessary to defrag the drive.

Right. XP's Disk Defragmenter tool (Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Disk Defragmenter) will tell you if you need to do it or not. Just select your main hard drive from the list (usually "C:") and then click the "Analyze" button and wait a few minutes for it to finish analyzing your Disk. It will then tell you if you need to Defragment or not in a results window.

If it suggests you should Defragment, then just click the "Defragment" button. The defragmenting process could take several hours, so you may want to run it when you know you're not going to be using your computer for awhile.

I analyze my Disk about once every 6 months.

wow! finally a good answer! I did as you said, ( did not know how to do this before) and it said I did not need to.
I thank you so much, I did not know about the analizer before,I just went a head and defraged. Now I know .thanks very much **Karla

You're welcome. Please come again. :)

"Please do not offer my god a peanut."

If you want to get technical about it, you should defrag every time you install a new program also. This helps put the fill in the gaps left by the tempory installation files once they are removed, and puts the program files back near each other on the disk.

That is only if you want to be real geeky, otherwise, every couple months is ok.

This is good stuff to know. I've been defrag-ing my drive every week.