DavePeaceman :
Thank you for your time! I truly appreciate it. I am on a HP Pavilion g7-1338dx Notebook PC. And about 6 months ago I upgraded to Windows 10. I use the Windows defrag. It automatically defrags everything but my C drive, (for reasons unknown,) so I defrag it once a month still using the Windows defrag. That is when I noticed that the "system hard drive" said it was 97% fragmented and "needs optimization." But when I click the otpimize button, it runs for almost a second and then goes right back to sayin the same thing it did before. Is this something I should be concerned about?
The reason why i asked your system requirements was to know if your system disk is either a HDD or SSD. If it would be SSD then the defrag isn't needed at all. But since yours is HDD (7200rpm), defrag is still needed.
Since an installer under Windows is defined as a program that takes a directory of files in one nice neat place and spreads them all over your computer with no hope of ever knowing where they all went, a disk defragmentation and optimization is needed.
Defragmentation - what it does,
Imagine a book split into several parts, some pages are over here, other pages in another room on another floor altogether. You will have to walk a lot when you need to read the book. It may sound silly, but this is exactly what happens to files on your harddisk. Defragmentation will put all the parts (fragments) back together, making your computer a lot faster.
Optimization - what it does,
Imagine a big library with lots of books, spread out all over the building and not sorted whatsoever. There is an index telling you exactly where every book is, but you will have to walk a lot when you need several books. This is exactly what happens on your harddisk, the files that belong to an application can be all over the place, anywhere on the harddisk. Optimization will bring all the files together in one place, leaving the rest of the harddisk empty, and will sort the files, for example alphabetically.
Defragmentation and optimization will not only make a hard disk faster, but also lengthen it's life span, because the disk will have less work to do and therefore have less wear and tear. Also, it will refresh and strengthen the magnetic data on the harddisk by simply reading the (weakened) data and writing it afresh. However, defragmenting and optimizing is work, so excessive defragmenting and optimizing can actually cause more wear and tear than it prevents.
That being said, for Windows 10 and 8.1, one of the best defrag program is: Auslogics Disk Defrag.
link: http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/
For Windows 7 and earlier OSes (e.g XP, Vista, 2000) i recommend MyDefrag.
link: http://www.mydefrag.net/
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