Someone told me to defragment my drive
Defragmenting is a 2000s HDD trick. On an SSD it does nothing useful and just wears the drive.
Try this first
- 1Open 'Optimize Drives' (search Start). Note the drive type.
- 2If it says 'Solid-State Drive': Windows does no defrag, only TRIM. That is good, runs weekly automatically. Leave it alone.
- 3If it says 'Hard disk drive' (HDD): weekly defrag is useful. The built-in scheduler already does it, no external tool needed.
- 4Ignore 2014 YouTube tutorials pushing 'optimization tools'. On modern Windows that is redundant and sometimes harmful.
When to bring us in
Not needed.
See also
- My laptop is suddenly slowThree main suspects: a runaway background process, near-full disk, or a Windows update in progress.
- One specific application is slow for everyoneIf an app is slow for one person: local. For everyone at once: server side or vendor side.
- Opening files from the file server takes minutesOften the server itself is fine and the issue is network routing or stalling DNS resolution.
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