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What is Defragmenting?

Defragmenting is taking related data saved on your hard drive and reorganizing it to be recorded closer to related items that are used together. Each time you save something to your hard drive the all the information is not saved at the same place on your disk. Your computers hard drive is divided into small blocks each with it's own address. All blocks hold the same amount of data and most of the things we save to our disk are much larger than one block. Windows simply saves the first part of the data on one free block along with the location of the next block that it will save more of the data on. This continues until all the data is saved. As you use your computer there are fewer free blocks together and so the data is saved on whatever free block windows can find. 

This is very similar to the way my garage is organized. As I use tools I store them very close to where I used them ( I leave them laying wherever!). As I do more and more projects my tools get more and more fragmented. After a while the 1/2' socket is nowhere near the ratchet, etc.

Using a defragmenter on your computer simply examines each block on your computer and moves the data so that all related blocks are now together.

When I defragment my garage I do the same thing. I examine each tool and then place it in a storage spot with similar tools that I will use together. When I am done all my sockets are with the ratchet ( I hope). 

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