On a hard drive, heads on moveable arms impart magnetic charges to sections of spinning discs. In effect, these charged sections are the files you bring up on your computer. And, while your merry-go-round spins at a nice leisurely pace, the discs that hold your info, also known as platters, are whirling around at speeds up to 15,000rpm.
Hard drives are temperamental about the temperature inside your computer’s case. Cleaning the inside of your case is a surefire to keep your drive cool. All you need to do is remove one side panel on your case and use a can of compressed air to blow the dust out of your computer.
Before you dive into dusting your computer components, touch a piece of metal to get rid of any static electricity that may have built up. Though it may literally be a shocking experience for you, it will be much less painful than having to replace a fried hard drive or motherboard.
This is also the perfect time to check your fans to make sure they’re all working correctly. You must have properly functioning fans to ensure that air can circulate through your case.Once you take care of the hardware aspect of drive maintenance and make sure the inside of your case is sparkling, there’s plenty you can do from a software perspective to make sure your drive is in tip-top shape.
Disk Cleanup lets you remove unneeded files such as temporary file directories, deleted files in the Recycle Bin, and unneeded downloaded program files. Removing these files is an easy way to free up some valuable hard drive space. To run Disk Cleanup in Windows XP, click Start.
After you run Disk Cleanup, it’s time to run Disk Defragmenter in WinXP . When you delete or remove files from your hard drive, you actually create gaps between bits of information on the disks. Instead of all of the data in a file being stored contiguously, it ends up scattered all over the drive; this slows down file retrieval and makes your drive work harder than it needs to.
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