Defragging a hard drive

defragging can make a noticeable difference if your drive is heavily fragmented. But unless it gets to a pretty severe point, most people do not notice a difference after doing so. Some people are extremely obsessed with defragmenting, doing so once a week or more. But realistically, such frequent defragmenting yields minimal to nonexistant perceptable performance improvements in most cases. I would advise that you defrag 3 or 4 times per year at *most*, unless you are in the habit of frequently moving lots of data on and off your drive, shuffling large amounts of data around on the drive, etc, which promotes fragmentation. Otherwise, it is unlikely that your drive will become fragmented enough to cause real performance problems in typical usage, so 3 or 4 times per year (and for many people as little as once or twice a year) is more than enough to keep things running well. The defragmenter that comes with XP does a reasonably good job of keeping things in order and running smoothly so I would not really recommend spending your money on 3rd party defragmenter tools. Even if they are a little better, or a little faster than XP's defragmenter, the performance difference is likely to be insignificant versus the cost of the program.