thisismyurl.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/ultradefragscreenshot.jpg" rel="lightbox[roadtrip]">Anybody who knows me in person can tell you that I’m a Mac guy, I carry a MacBook with me everywhere I go, if my high school family studies class had given me a MacBook instead of an egg to care for the little bugger might have survived but alas, a little known fact about me is that I’m secretly a PC user as well.

It’s true, I go both ways.

My MacBook is small and light, it’s powerful and easy to use but I also run a Windows XP computer (named Bob) at my home for gaming and testing as well as a Windows 2000 machine for testing and dual booting to Linux for application testing. The problem is, Windows machines need to be de-fragmented regularly and I always find the built in Windows defrag utility lacking.

Enter UltraDefrag, an easy to use and free windows defrag client that I stumbled upon the other day with the help of an article at tech-buzz. Actually, they had two great articles on the subject of defragging.

UltraDefrag is a small, simple to use and free utility for defragging your Windows computer and includes the ability to fix your fragmentations at startup. It lacks good documentation but that’s easy to get around with a little bit of common sense … click either Analyses or Defragment depending on which you’d like to do. Another great feature is that it provides you with a list of files which are still fragmented after it’s run, which is invaluable to helping you understand why your computer is running slowly.

What is fragmenting?

Silly thing, but some people might know what file fragmentation is so let me explain it to you in a very simple overview, the same way I explained it to my son last week.

Your computer hard drive is like a big green LEGO board and your files are standard LEGO pieces. As we know, most LEGO pieces are all different sizes and files are the same. When you go to save a file to your hard drive it writes the file to the first available slot and does the same with each extra file you go to save. As long as you don’t delete anything off your computer, it keeps writing files in a linear order. However if you delete a file it leaves a space which your computer will try to write into … regardless of the size of the file. 

To ensure it can fit the file into the space, your computer will split the larger file into a piece that will fit into the hole and write the remaining piece (or pieces) in the next available holes resulting in file fragmentation.  As you can see in the example to the right, the red file is now fragmented, when your computer tries to load the file it will have to go to multiple areas of your hard drive to find the pieces and then put it back together again before it can be used.

What programs such as UltraDefrag do is reassemble the files into one consistent file on your computer and move it to an available area of your hard drive which in turn saves your computer time and resources when looking to load the file.