Third-party defrag tools have long trumped Windows’ own meagre efforts, and in recent years a number of powerful, versatile and feature-rich freebies have come on to the market, such as Puran Defrag Free and Auslogics Disk Defrag. Your hard drive is the biggest bottleneck in your system, so it pays to make sure it’s defragged regularly to give it the best possible chance of performing at a half-decent level.

And even though Windows 7 and Vista do attempt to run on a weekly basis, the default timing isn’t great and the results are barely adequate.

XP’s Defrag tool doesn’t even run automatically, so it’s essential you find another solution. Net result: files are slower to access, so computer slows down, but another side-effect is that the drive’s temperature increases and its moving parts wear out that much quicker. Defragging your hard drive is an essential part of PC maintenance as otherwise files get scattered in multiple segments (or fragments) all over your drive, forcing the disk’s mechanical parts to work harder to piece them back together when they’re needed. Let us be frank: the Windows Defragmentation tool is best described as functional.

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