MCSA/MCSE Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-270): Installing ...

10-60 Chapter 10 Managing Data Storage
Real World When to Defragment
Windows XP actually uses volumes formatted with NTFS pretty efficiently, so the
need to routinely defragment a disk is not as great as it used to be. In fact, several
recent tests have shown that there is not really a significant improvement in computer
performance after defragmenting even a very fragmented drive. Nonetheless,
defragmentation is a quick safe process that, simply put, just makes users
feel better. Consider defragmenting drives two or three times per year. Better yet,
show users how to do it themselves. You can also use Scheduled Tasks to schedule
Disk Defragmenter to run automatically. Just configure a task to run at the
desired times and launch the defrag.exe program located in the %systemroot%\system32
folder. After scheduling the task, open the advanced properties
for the task and add the drive you want to defragment to the command line. An
example command line would look something like %System-
Root%\System32\Defrag.exe d. For more information on using Scheduled Tasks,
see Chapter 18, “Using Windows XP Tools.”
How to Scan a Hard Disk for Errors with Check Disk
F10us23
Check Disk attempts to repair file system errors, locate bad sectors, and recover readable
information from those bad sectors. All files must be closed for this program to
run. To access Check Disk, select the drive you want to check in Windows Explorer or
My Computer. Click the File menu, click Properties, click the Tools tab, and click Check
Now. Select one of the options on the Check Disk dialog box shown in Figure 10-23.
The options are explained in Table 10-7.
Figure 10-23 Use Check Disk to analyze and fix the file structure on a volume.