How To Defrag Windows 10 Hard Drive Beginners [Tutorial]

How To Defrag Windows 10 Hard Drive Beginners [Tutorial]

In order to minimize slow hard drive performance, Windows 10 (and so Windows 8.1, Windows 7, and previous versions), includes a built-in tool to defragment all fragmented files and help your PC stay at top speeds.

Over the years, improvements have been made to the Windows drive optimization tool. However, even when the operating system can accurately detect the type of storage and handle defragmentation of files automatically, it's not always optimal. Because you may not keep your PC turned on long enough or you may have an external hard drive that it's not always connected to your computer that prevents maintenance from running properly.

As a result, the time will come when you'll begin to notice that opening apps and saving files to disk will take longer than usual, in which case manual optimization may be required. In this Windows 10 guide, we'll show you the easy steps to check if your hard drive is fragmented and defragment as necessary to keep your computer running more efficiently.

Over time, files on your hard drive get fragmented, and your desktop or laptop slows down because it has to check multiple places on your drive for those pieces. To have your computer run more efficiently, use the built-in tool in Windows to defragment those files. Here's how and when you should do it.

Windows 10, like Windows 8 and Windows 7 before it, automatically defragments files for you on a schedule (by default, once a week). However, it doesn't always run consistently, so if you notice files are taking longer to load or you just want to double-check every month or so, you can see how fragmented the drive is in Windows.

It’s simple to defragment – or 'defrag' – your storage in Windows 10. If you have a hard drive you’ve been using for a long time without disk defragmentation, you may have noticed performance steadily slowing down.

That likely means it’s time to perform a defrag on that drive.

Before we begin, you should ensure the drive you plan to defrag is a hard drive and not a solid state drive (SSD). The Windows 10 defrag tool can tell you which type of drives you have.

This tutorial will apply for computers, laptops, desktops,and tablets running the Windows 10, Windows 8/8.1, Windows 7 operating systems.Works for all major computer manufactures (Dell, HP, Acer, Asus, Toshiba, Lenovo, Samsung).