How often should I run DEFRAG on my hard drive? Here is a tip that may help you to reduce the frequency of optimizing your hard drive. Run DEFRAG once a week to find the current level of fragmentation and keep a record of the fragmentation level. Do not optimize the drive unless the fragmentation level is higher than 7%. After a defrag, keep a record again each week to see how long it takes to reach 7%. Over time, you will see a pattern. The chances are that it will take a month or maybe two months to reach that level, and that is when you should be doing the full optimization. Somewhere in the past (DOS 4.0 or 5.0, maybe) when hard drives were much smaller than they are today, power users found that their drives were rapidly becoming fragmented. Thus, it became a standard for these users to use a defragmentation utility once a week or so. Their fragmentation percentage was usually around 10-15%, so a defrag was a good way to pick up performance and disk efficiency. Power users are defined as those people, usually in corporate or company environments, who can create and juggle five spreadsheets at once. Or who jump between databases a lot, or who provide support for a lot of users, or something of that nature. They are sometimes PC experts, but sometimes they are just specialists in a particular area and know how to make the software hum. They can also be consultants or have their own business for providing applications to companies or other users, too. Unfortunately, with the incorporation of larger hard drives into personal computer systems, the underlying purpose behind the weekly frequency of defrag is lost. It evolved into a sort of unwritten rule that you MUST defrag once a week to keep your system in top shape. While this may still be a good rule for power users as well as those computer users who have less than 10% free space on their hard drives, it does not apply to everyone. Actually, if you can reach a 7-10% fragmentation level in a week, it might mean that you need a bigger hard drive. This is true if you are consistently running with less than 20 megabytes of free space. Quite often, the two will go together! The 7-10% fragmentation level is generally a good time to optimize, since disk efficiency and performance are improved by defragging at that time. Up until then, a defrag provides little benefit. It is reasonable to find that the fragmentation level rises to around 2% in just a day or two after a defrag. It can take several weeks after that before it rises to even 7%. It all depends on how the system is being used and what software is being used. A full optimization with DEFRAG when the fragmentation level is only 2% or 3%, though, is almost always an inefficient use of the utility. One more thing; during the optimization phase of the DEFRAG program, there are certain points when a power outage or other interruption can upset the rhythm of the system momentarily and cause a complete lockup. DEFRAG is somewhat sensitive to any kind of interruption, but it usually does a very good job of keeping the integrity of the system. The likelihood that any momentary interruption will occur right at a critical point in the optimization phase is small, but it is there. The more often the defrag optimization is run, the more likely it is to be susceptible to a momentary hit. As a consequence, it is recommended that DEFRAG be used only when it is really needed. The 7-10% line is a good time for it. The DEFRAG utility will usually make a correct recommendation on whether to do a full defragmentation or to just optimize the current files that are on the drive. The latter takes a short time, whereas the full defragmentation takes a long time, even several hours. If a full defragmentation is done when it is not really needed, there is very little benefit, unless you need an excuse to watch your favorite TV program. If you have any questions about this procedure, please post a note in the appropriate topic or forum area. Be sure to include your DOS version and your model number (i.e., 2155-G82).