When it come to data throughput, the hard drive in your computer is probably the slowest component in your computer. Most laptops have a 5400 RPM and some netbook hard drives are only 4800 RPM; the slower the RPM of the drive, the slower the drive can read and write data. The only way to fix this is to get a faster hard drive which is not an option for most people, or to have your hard drive reading less data when it tries to read and write data. The less data your hard drive has to read in order to do something, the faster it can do it. Normally to do this you would have to do use a utility like WinZip or Peazip and compress your files, but this is a hassle and makes you files harder to access.
All modern versions of Windows feature hard drive compression and unlike utilities like Winzip or Peazip, this compression is completely transparent to the user. Now, if you Google ‘NTFS compression’ you will see lots of results with people debating on how effective compression is and whether or not it it can make a difference in a computer’s speed. Well here's the truth: if your hard drive is the bottle neck in your computer (if your hard drive light is almost always on), then compression will speed things up. If your processer is the bottle neck on your system (if taskmanager shows your processer at 100% most of the time) , then compression won’t help.
The idea behind using compression to speed up your computer is simple when you look at it like this: The speed of your hard drive is measured in milliseconds, and the speed of your processer is measured in nanoseconds, which are smaller than milliseconds. By compressing your drive you can shrink the size of the data on it (say from 50mb to 15mb) which will speed up the time it takes to read the data. So to read 50mb of compressed data, your hard drive only sends 15mb of data to the processer, which then decompresses the data back to 50mb. The speed difference is really noticeable on slow hard drives.
There are 4 simple steps to speeding up your netbook or laptop hard drive.
1. Run CCleaner. This will remove junk files (internet history, temp files, etc) from your computer and will speed up the next step.
2. Compress your files. Click on the Start Orb on your taskbar, then Computer and then double click on your C: drive. Next select all of the folders EXCEPT for the Windows folder. Right click on the selection and select properties. On the General tab click the Advanced button. Check the box next to ‘Compress contents to save disk space’ then click Ok. Back in the properties window click on ‘Apply’ and then in the new window select to apply changes to subfolders and files then click OK.
After a few minutes you should get a warning saying that the attributes could not be applied to a file, just click ignore all. The compression process will take a while to complete.
3. Add Anti-virus exclusion. Any anti-virus software with resident protection will scan each file as it is read or written to the disk. This is good for catching viruses, but bad for performance. As you compressed you hard drive in step 2, your antivirus software should have been scanning each file for viruses at the same time meaning that if it didn’t see any popup warnings about infected files, then you should be virus free. I would recommend adding your ‘Program Files’ folder to the exclusion list of your anti-virus program. This will speed up the launch of your programs, especially executable heavy programs like GIMP, Photoshop and any video editing software.
4. Defragment. This last step is crucial. After you first compress your hard drive you will have a ton of fragmented files. You can easily get rid of the fragments by searching for ‘defragment’ in your start menu and then running the built in Windows defragmenter tool. If you’d like a nicer tool for removing fragments, I recommend using Defraggler. It is free and has a lot of handy features.
That’s it! Hopefully after doing these four simple steps you will notice that your slow hard drive isn’t as slow as it was. If you have any tips for speeding up your hard drive, then email us at CaseyTech@GMX.com with ‘Speed Up Hard Drive’ as the subject. Or you could leave us a comment below!
