Computer Repair Tips

Tag: hard disk

  • Defragment your hard disk easily using JKDefrag

    Over time, the hard disk on your computer can become very disorganised.  Files get written to the disk, some get deleted, more files get written, and so on.  Every time a file gets deleted, the space it occupied is available to be reused.  But if the new file you want to write is too large to be written to that space, what happens is that a piece of the file gets written there, and another piece gets written somewhere else.  This process of breaking files up into smaller pieces when writing them to the hard disk is known as Fragmentation.  The files are said to be Fragmented.

    As more files get written and deleted, this fragmentation of the hard disk increases.  More files are being broken up into smaller chunks, making the hard disk work harder trying to read back all the fragments. (more…)

  • CrystalDiskInfo

    CrystalDiskInfo is a great little free tool for checking the general health of your hard drive.  It works by reading the S.M.A.R.T. data off your hard disk and displays it in a simple graphical format.  It can work with internal or external hard disks, with either IDE (ATA/PATA) or SATA connectors, and it even works for hard disks plugged in via USB.

    Each of the S.M.A.R.T. parameters has a threshold, beyond which it could indicate a drive starting to fail.  If CrystalDiskInfo determines that any parameter is showing potential problems, it will highlight that row in the results table. (more…)

  • Why you should shutdown your computer and not just press the off button

    This article explains why it is important to shutdown your computer properly.

    In our repair shop, we are sometimes asked by customers if there is any harm in shutting down their computer by just pressing the power button for a few seconds, rather than going through the Windows shutdown procedure.

    As far as the customer in concerned, the end result appears to be the same, the computer shuts down. In fact, from their point of view, holding the power button for a few seconds appears to shut down the computer immediately, whereas a proper Windows shutdown takes maybe 20 to 30 seconds. So is it a good idea to do this?

    To get straight to the point, it is a very, very bad idea to shutdown your computer by holding the power button. (more…)