When youve had enough of all your books, texts and papers cluttering up your desk you might decide to sort through them and leave them in a tidy pile on one side of the desk. This is what the PC does when you ask it to defragment your hard disk. When a file is created it is left any-old-where on the hard disk. When the disk is defragmented the computer collects all these files together and deposits them in one area, leaving a nice clean collection of empty sectors on the hard disk, ready for more information. Defragmenting the hard disk every two months or so (if you use a stand alone) is good computer health procedure. Windows 95 and '98 give you this option from within disk tools.

A file is not necessarily all stored in one place on your hard disk. It is often broken into smaller segments and stored in different places. This means slower access. A disk defragmenter rearranges your hard disk so that each file is stored in one segment.

A computer procedure which reorders and makes contiguous any fragmented files on a hard disk.