Computer Help
How do I protect myself from identity theft?
- Well, this is a very large topic. So, I will leave it up to the experts. Here is a link, where you can read a lot about this topic. If you have questions, please call us and we will help with the computer related issues.
- Well, as you know your computer is capable of holding a lot of information. Your hard drive can hold your family pictures, favorite games, applications or music. As these files are written to the hard drive they can be placed continuously or in multiple locations on the disk. How the data is written depends upon how much contiguous space is available.
What I mean is, if you have added and then removed or relocated files from one folder to another the computer has fragmented the file or files without you knowing. When a file is moved or deleted it creates empty space where it was and takes new space where it was copied or moved to. Then when you add more files or move existing files, the computer will try to fill the empty space. After awhile, your files are no longer in contiguous space and are fragmented over multiple locations on the hard drive. As you try to open a file or listen to music the drive must traverse the hard drive to read the file. As the file is being read, it takes more time than it would if the file was written continuously. Your computer is now slower, due to the time it takes to read the fragmented files.
To help speed up your computer, you should defragment the hard drive at least once a week. If you are using Microsoft Windows, you have the ability to use the built in defragment tool. It could take some time to defragment your hard drive (disk) depending upon how badly your disk is fragmented. You can download free tools from the Internet as well. Some tools can be scheduled to run automatically. I suggest that you download one of those tools, install it and schedule it to run at least once a week. I actually run my defragmentation program daily. I have scheduled it to run at night when I am sleeping. That way, my computer operates at peak performance each and every day. The tool I use can be downloaded for free; it's name is Defraggler and can be found here.