Your old system might appear to need an upgrade, if you’ve been using your computer for over a year. It just seems to become slower, over time. Windows takes longer to boot, applications take a few more seconds to start and your system can feel a lot more sluggish. One option is simply to purchase a brand new and faster hard drive. Re-install Windows and your favourite applications and you’ll suddenly find everything is a lot more snappy. However, after a few months of using the new drive, your system will be sluggish again.

Why does this happen? Simply as the more applications you install and remove from your computer, the more likely your drive will become fragmented. This occurs when files are stored in different locations on your drive and your drive has to spin more than usual to load Windows and your applications. Defragment your drive and the contents will be stored in one continuous block, so you’ll find your system starts more quickly and your PC appears to be running more smoothly.

The Windows defragmentation tool isn’t the best available. It’s rather slow, so if you have a huge hard drive it can take hours to finish defragmenting your drive. Worse, you can’t really do anything whilst it’s performing the defragmentation process.

Defraggler is a new tool from the developers who brought you CCleaner. It’s small and compact and will enable you to defragment a collection of files, as well as your entire drive.

Note that this is the portable version of Defraggler.