You've Cleaned Up Your Pictures, Now What?

 

If you're like most of us, you're basking in the holiday aftermath with all those great digital pictures you took, maybe even a fair amount of videos. As you realize that you might be able to reduce the actual pictures you keep from a few hundred to maybe a few score and still not lose any memories, you may have deleted hundreds, or are in the process of doing so.

But then, there's the school play with your kids, a mid-winter visit to see the grandkids, and you find yourself collecting even more pictures! So what's the effect of this on your PC?

Well, while not damaged, it's not in an optimal state. It's as if you've taken your car for a long trip, with stop-and-go traffic, side trips on less-than-smooth roads, and lots of wear and tear. It could use a tune up. The constant deleting of picture files, adding new ones, and deleting again and again creates lots of holes on your computer's hard drive.

The Windows operating system (whether Vista, XP, or any other) does not do a good job of housecleaning your drive. When you delete a file (e.g. picture), a gap is created on your disk drive. Actually, if the drive was fragmented to begin with, there could be several gaps, even hundreds. And when you store your next picture, there's a good chance that the picture will be broken up into several pieces (fragments), and when you go to view that picture, it will take much longer than it should. That's the pain that a fragmented drive will bring you.

Running a disk defragmentation utility, like PerfectDisk, puts your files back together so that they are in a single piece. This makes it much easier for Windows to read the file, so you'll view your pictures much more quickly. You'll move between pictures more quickly as well. And just about everything you do on your PC will be faster and easier.