One of the main causes of slow windows PC performance is file fragmentation, file fragmentation is something that happens over time as a pc gets more and more use. It can occur during everyday usage, when you install new programs, when windows updates automatically, install themselves, and for many other reasons as well.
To understand how you can make a PC faster just by using a disk defrag tool such as Diskeeper you need to understand how files are stored on you PC. I good analogy is a physical filing cabinet. Imagine that the data storage device inside your computer (The hard drive) is a drawer in a filing cabinet, inside the drawer are hanging files that contain the contents of your my documents folder, pictures folder, videos folder, windows systems folders etc.
Fragmentation is where the "hanging files" contents have been added one after the next and are in no particular order. In addition when one item is updated, just the updated part is now stored further back in the related hanging file. If this was a physical filing cabinet it would be useless by this stage. Computers are so fast they can search thought the cabinet draw so find all the bits for one file so quickly that you don't notice a difference. That is up to a point...
File fragmentation starts to have detrimental effect on your PC's performance once a larger number of key files become fragmented. Most people have maybe a thousand documents and pictures, what they don't realise is that Microsoft windows itself is made up of many thousands of files all working together. It is this structure that once fragmented is one of the main causes of slow pc start up times and even sometimes computer crashing and freezing issues.
Defragmentation software finds all these file pieces and reassembles them as complete items again. This saves the computer time when opening files and where previously fragmented. Although the time saved to open one file is too small to notice, when your computer is opening hundreds of files while windows starts up it can add up to a big difference.
The same is true for software as well, I've often seen software such as word processor programs take 20 seconds to open before a computer is defragged and as little as just a few seconds afterwards.
So why not just use the defrag tool built into windows? Answer, it just has not got the advanced functions of something like Diskeeper. Diskeeper can defragment system files that the standard windows tool cannot do anything about. It also has advanced features to optimise system start up related files that just don't exist in the windows tool.
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