Over time, your Windows computer's hard drive tends to become fragmented. When it writes to the disk, your computer places information in small spaces, called clusters, which are arranged haphazardly all over your hard drive. Similarly, when data is deleted, holes remain on your disk. So, to access files, your computer must scan the entire disk surface to gather the useful information. This results in a slowdown of your computer.
To remedy this, you can then defragment your computer in order to optimize the space occupied on your hard drive by storing or reorganizing the stored information.
But while it's clear that fragmentation causes your computer to slow down, it's hard to quantify that slowdown. That's why O&O Software has released O&O SpeedCheck a small free utility that allows you to simulate the speed gain that would result from defragmenting your machine.
This utility will attempt to test your system's performance in a fragmented environment and in a defragmented environment. To do this, it will attempt to simulate reading specific files that are increasingly fragmented, and then it will simulate reading these same files in one piece. The difference in processing time will allow it to estimate the performance gain you can achieve by defragmenting your disk.
Well obviously, behind it, O&O is trying to palm off its software on you, but beyond that the test is quite interesting and allows you to partly quantify the gain that defragmentation can bring!
