I remember when someone told me that defragmenting was a good thing and that it would speed up my internet surfing and file searching and playing first person shooters! Then I learned what defragmenting actually does; windows re-writes information on the harddrive in a more orderly fashion to facilitate faster reading of continuous files. Although harddrives generally do a good job of not messing this re-writing up, mistakes can and will happen. And if they happen while re-writing a system file for instance BAM! You’ve just created your next headache! Although defraging is essential for quick operation of the harddrive I would only do it when windows recommends to do so, or when you notice a lot of harddisk activity and slowed performance. Each time you write data onto the drive there is a chance that the data can be corrupted - this is windows after all, don’t do it more than necessary!
How to defrag your drives:
click Start
click Programs
click Accessories
click System Tools
click Disk Defragmenter
choose a drive to analyze
click Analyze
Windows will tell you if you should defragment or not. The defragmenting action may take awhile so go get a snack.