What Windows optimization can improve hard drive access times?

During the normal use of a Windows system, one of your end users has found that it has become slower to load and save files on the hard drive. What Windows optimization feature can improve the access time of the entire hard drive?

A) Disk Cleanup

B) MSCONFIG

C) Performance Manager

D) Defragmentation

The answer: D) Defragmentation

As files are written to the hard drive, they take whatever available space might be available, even if the operating system has to split the file. After time, the hard drive consists of files that are split and scattered around the drive, making the access times slower as the hard drive moves around the drive to collect all of the pieces. The defragmentation process reads the pieces of each file and rewrites the pieces to an area of the drive where they can be stored contiguously, in one piece.

Want to know more? Watch “Optimizing the Windows Operating System.” Windows includes a number of utilities that can help optimize the performance of applications. In this video, we’ll show you how to use Task Manager and Performance Manager, and we’ll discuss best practices for optimizing the Windows operating system.