A critical perfomance issue on all Windows-based machines is disk fragmentation. Fix that, and you fix a lot of issues.
The first thing you need to wrap your mind around is the relative speed of a magnetic hard drive. Consider the typical processor is capabile of 1,5-3.5 billion operations a second and and main memory can be read perhaps 100 million times a second. But a small disk files can be read only 10,000 times a second - a veritible eternity in the rehlm of computer.
In a nut shell, fragmentation is caused when the OS decided - for whatever reason - to begin writing some file data into an area that is not large enough to hold the entire piece of data. When it realizes that the file data exceeds the available space, it then chooses another area to continue the write operation, a process that continues until the file data is written...or the disk fills up. Each file piece, or "fragement" has to be recorded in the file allocation table so that it can be reconstructed later. Accessing and reassembling all those pieces is very time consuming, and precisely what you need to remedy.
Enter the "Disk Defragmenter" or just "defragger" if you are cool.
Recommendation:
Try IOBit's Smart Defrag.
Product Comments:
It's free, but donateware, so be careful NOT to buy anything unless you really want it. I suggest that you download it from the link provided above, since the vendor uses several different shareware providers.
When you install it, go slowly and DON'T install the Yahoo tool bar unless you REALLY want it - most annoying. Guess they are trying to make some money there, but I'm not interested in their tactics.
Set it up to "Deep Defrag" and scheduled it on a daily or twice weekly basis, and then give it a few days to collect stats on your files. You should notice gradual but significant gains as you use your system.
Final comments:
1. Windows 7 comes with a more functional defragger than did previous Microsoft OS's. But it's still not very good in my opinion.
2. Yes, solid state hard drives are better at reducing the fragmention of the storage of the file data, but as I indicated above, that is only part of the picture. My recommendation is to NOT schedule a defragger on SSD's, but run in only occasionally to ensure that the directories are clean.
