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01 March 2010
How to defragment your computer’s drives or individual files and folders using free defragmentation utilities.
In this tutorial, we will learn how to defragment your computer using a free defragmentation utility. There are quite a few good free defragmentation utilities available for download, however, for the purposes of this tutorial we will be looking at defraggler from Piriform (the folks who also bring us CCleaner).
You may be asking why you would need a separate defrag utility when Microsoft Windows already provides a Disk Defragmenter. In short, some would answer that third party disk maintenance tools outperform the stock disk maintenance tools provided with your WIndows installation. As it concerns disk defragmentation, the reasons we recommend defraggler or Smart Defrag over the stock Windows utility are speed, flexibility, portability and convenient features.
Defraggler from Piriform
Downloading Defraggler
1. To download Defraggler, click here: http://www.piriform.com/defraggler. Once you’ve reached the site, click the « Download » button. 
2. At the bottom of this next page, click « Alternative Download ». 
3. From the windows dialogue, click “Save File”. 
4. Save the file to your Desktop. We can erase the setup file once installation is complete. 
Installing Defraggler
5. Double-click « dfsetup117 » from your Desktop to launch the installation. 
6. If prompted, click “Run”. 
7. Select your preferred installation language and click “OK”. 
8. Click “Next”… 
9. Click “I Agree”… 
10. Click “Next”… 
11. I recommend you uncheck the “Yahoo! Toolbar” option and click, “Install”… 
12. Click “Finish”… 
How to use Defraggler
13. Start by clicking “Analyze” to determine if your drive requires defragmentation.
14. If the analysis status reports that you have fragmented files, simply click the “Defrag” button. If you click the small arrow to the right of the “Defrag” button, you have the option of choosing a full “Defrag” or “Quick Defrag”. 
15. For a Map legend of the various block colors and what type of files these represent, simply click “Help>Drive Map Legend” from the menu.
16. One unique feature of Defraggler that isn’t available in any other defragmentation utility is the option to defragment specific folders or files. To access this option, select “Action” from the menu.
17. Depending on the level of file fragmentation, Defraggler may take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours to reorganize your file fragments. Of course, this will take less time if you perform regular weekly or monthly defragmentation. 
16. You can schedule automatic defragmentation by choosing “Settings>Options” from the menu. From the Options window, click on the “Schedule” tab. You can select which drives to defragment, frequency, start date and time. As you can see, I’ve scheduled mine for weekly defragmentation. You can create different schedules for each of your drives or partitions. In my case, I have 8 drives or partitions of which 6 are merely for storage and are only used occasionally. For those six, I’ve scheduled monthly scans.
17. Another advantage of Defraggler is the fact that it is portable. You could easily install it to and run it from a USB thumb drive.
Hope this helps!
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