defrag your computer

So my home computer is acting a little wonky. I can't open anything on my desk top, but can open things from the quick launch. Once something is open, if there is a "click here" link it wont work. And probably the program open wont close. If a drop down menu is involved, likely it wont work. Switching between programs requires the alt+tab shortcut because clicking on it doesn't work. Oh, and sometime last night my keyboard stoppped responding (that might be part of the fix, so I'll have to see if it works after a reboot).

So after running all the antivirals and such I had and coming up with nothing, I emailed my older brother, who is positively amazing with computers. He has this thing where he can take over my computer. It's like magic.

He does some hocus pocus and deletes temporary files and downloads two programs, one is a cleaner (to help get rid of the trash stuff that your computer collects) and the other is a defragger.

We started the defragger last night at around 9pm and it was only 38% done this morning when I woke up. Apparently your computer's ideal fragmented percent is no higher than 5%. Mine was at 59% fragmented.

What this means, as my brother explained it, is when you have something to save/download onto your computer, it doesn't neatly store it. Instead it finds the first available space. Only, and here's where it gets weird, the computer doesn't keep the thing you're saving/downloading in one place. The analogy my brother used was a 40 page document. Basically the computer stores each page in a different location, makes a note of the location, and when it's needed goes and retrieves each page individually.

I don't know yet if this will fix my wonkiness, but it will certainly help speed things up. When my home computer is no longer wonky, I'll post the links for the free cleaner and defragger.