A few issues that I have with your comment: you say that “I find that the best way to speed up a computer is by defragmenting it.” This sounds like the sales pitch for a lot of fly-by-night Web sites that claim to fix up your computer and make it run faster. It is vague, and it is so simplistic as to be incorrect. Now, do not take too much offense to that—I suspect that Windows running on FAT or NTFS is probably all that you know and so maybe you feel that your statement is absolutely correct. If that is the case, do read on.

Microsoft’s operating systems know how to speak to two major filesystems, the File Allocation Table (FAT) filesystem and the New Technology File System (NTFS). The FAT filesystem is a very simple filesystem with a fixed layout, and it comes in 12, 16, and 32-bit sizes (e.g., FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32). These filesystems only natively support short file names and are easily subject to filesystem corruption, as the filesystem family’s core design did not change much since 1980 and were not intended for the highly multitasking environments that it was used in near its end-of-life as a primary hard disk filesystem. Also, it was subject to extreme fragmentation, as DOS and Windows did not take any measures to try to proactively keep files from becoming fragmented.

Now, in modern versions of Windows which use NTFS as their primary filesystem, file fragmentation is not (as much) of a problem. It still of course is a problem, because it needs to be periodically defragmented. However, where one would typically recommend that a FAT16 or FAT32 filesystem be defragmented once a week, one can today easily recommend that NTFS filesystems on average consumer Windows systems can be defragmented once per month, or even once every other month. There is no harm in doing it more frequently than that, but it is not typically necessary to do so in order to keep filesystem performance up.

Now, to change gears a little bit: there are other filesystems and operating systems out there, and so your statement is perhaps most correctly stated thus: “… the best way to speed up an FAT or NTFS filesystem is to defragment it regularly.” Also, I do not run with FAT or NTFS on my hard disk as a primary filesystem, as I use GNU/Linux, and today I use both ext4 and btrfs for filesystems. I have been using the ext2/3/4 family for years, and not one have I actually run into a situation where file fragmentation was a problem on such a filesystem. Granted, for file fragmentation to be a problem on ext2 or ext3 you had to be running very heavy loads with a great number of users.

I find that the best way to speed up a computer is by defragmenting it.

You can use the Windows Defrag Tool that can speed up your computer by miles, I recently ran it on my five year old Windows XP Machine and now it flys!

Saves you money as you don’t have to buy a new computer.