The North Orange County Computer Club is helping The Gadgetress tackle the multitude of readers cries for help. NOCCC group has experts in all sorts of computer topics. The club, which meets monthly on various topics, has been in existence since 1976. Visit the club’s site at noccc.org.
Question: My rather dated PC is slowing down. We have tons of pics and would hate to lose our files. Here is the situation. Windows XP version 2002 service pack 2; Pentium 4 CPU 1.8 GHz 256 MB ram. C drive: 32.6 GB used, 3.38 GB free. Box not checked for ‘Compress disk to save disk space.’ Should we do “Disk Cleanup” or “disk Defragmenter”? Does the order matter? Should we have someone backup the whole hard drive before doing his or can they be run without problems?
NOCC: When I service a computer like yours, the first priority is to back up the whole hard drive. This serves a lot of purposes. First and foremost, it makes a safe copy of those “tons of pics,” and your other stuff. If you are like a lot of people, it is easy and cheap to take a lot of digital pictures and put your ONE and ONLY copy of them on the computer.
The reliability, capacity and cost of hard drives has improved tremendously. The first hard drive that IBM offered for the PC cost around $2,000 dollars for a 10 megabyte disk. Today, you can buy a drive that is far more reliable, holds one hundred thousand times as much data, and is one tenth the cost. However, a decades old quote is still true. “It is not a question of IF your hard disk will fail. It is a question of WHEN your hard disk fails.”
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