Disk Defragmentation

1. Describe what happens to a hard drive when it is formatted. (use technical terms in your description - page 165)

2. What happens to a file that is too large to fit in one cluster?

3. What causes a drive to become fragmented?

4. What are the results of a fragmented hard drive?

5. Open Computer and right click on the C: drive and select Properties. How big is this drive? What file system does it use?

6. Click on the Tools tab, what are the tools that are provided by Windows 7?

7. Unfortunately the defragment tool in Windows 7 is not visual so you will need to download and install another defragmenting tool that is provided by Piriform. What are the four free utilities this site provides for the home user for optimizing your PC? What does each tool do?

8. The one you want to download is the defraggler utility. Download and install the utility and then proceed with the rest of the lab. NOTE: You must be logged in as Comprep using comp as the password in order to install this software. Remember to click on the "Login to another domain" link when you press Ctrl + Alt + Del. Your login should look something like this: sq241-XX\comprep.

9. Click on the analyze button, how fragmented is your C: drive? (you will need to wait until the analysis is complete).

10. Click on the Drive Map tab, what do the blue, white and red colors represent?

11. Click on the Defragment button, what does the utility begin to do in order to defragment the drive?

12. NOTE: You should NEVER defragment an SSD drive, the process will have no affect on performance and will actually reduce the life of the drive. Using what you know about how a hard drive stores data and the fact that an SSD drive is really RAM explain why defragmentation does not improve performance on an SSD drive.

13. Show your answers and the running defragmenting program to your instructor for teacher check.