Auslogics Blog

Recently I’ve noticed a lot of people on the Internet asking what’s the difference between defragmenting your hard drive and defragmenting the Registry, and why one should defrag the Registry anyway. So here goes!

The Difference

When you defrag your hard disk, defragging software finds fragments of a file, that are scattered all over your hard disk. Then it moves the fragments and groups them together, so that the file is all in one place. So, basically, defragmentation puts the files back together.

Badly fragmented disk really slow down your computer, so you should defrag once a week if you download a lot of files and install a lot of software, or at least once a month.

Defragmenting, or rather compacting the Registry, is a very similar process. The difference is that this time files don’t get defragmented – it’s only your Registry.

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