Picture this: you live on a sprawling estate in the countryside. You have a security system that will alert you if any unauthorized intruders make their way onto the property. The only problem is, the "security system" is a squad of elderly gentlemen that shuffle contentedly and slowly down the paths, through the gardens and across the fields, taking a day or more to completely cover the estate.
They will radio the police if any trespassers are spotted, but given their speed, a nimble criminal -- or any number of them -- could easily make their way in and off with valuables before the old men are even aware of their presence, and they'd probably be laughing the whole time.
Obviously you wouldn't employ such a security system on your own property. So why would you do so on your computer?
You have most likely spent due time and trouble to utilize the best anti-virus and anti-spyware solutions that you could find to keep your computer safe from harmful files. They could be likened to lithe, black-suited security personnel patrolling your estate so you can sleep soundly at night.
But a common disease -- file fragmentation -- can turn those agile protectors into the stooped old men from the first example. On a disk with fragmented files, anti-virus and anti-spyware must take substantial extra time to scan each and every fragment of each and every file, causing scans to take many times longer than they should. Today, fragmentation is very serious; files in hundreds or even thousands of fragments are not at all uncommon.
Additionally, in today's frantically active computing environments, there are usually fixed times to schedule anti-virus and anti-spyware scans. If a scan cannot complete within the fixed time, then it must either be aborted or, worse, allowed to complete in a way that will slow down performance for every user on the system.
The most effective handle on fragmentation in such circumstances is one that is completely automatic, running invisibly in the background. Utilizing only otherwise-idle resources, such a solution guarantees that fragmentation is consistently addressed, and there is never a negative performance hit from defragmentation. Scheduling is never required. The fragmentation disease ceases to infect your applications, your file access and your overall performance.
Don't cripple the solutions you have employed to keep your computer safe. Utilize fully automatic defragmentation and keep your security personnel responsive, alert and fast-acting.
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