In Windows 8 and Windows 10, the names of some features from Windows 7 have changed. For example, the Windows Anytime Upgrade is now called Add Features to Windows 8/10. Disk Defragmenter has been changed to optimize disks. I don’t quite understand why the name change was necessary, but if you are looking for something in Windows 8/10 and cannot find it, it may be related to the name change.
In Windows 8, you can open the charms bar and search for “Optimize drives.” Luckily, you can still search your Disk Defragmenter and it will load the function you want.
In Windows 10, if you click Start and type “Defragment or Optimizeâ€, a “Defragment and Optimize Drives†link appears.
You can also access the Optimize Drives feature by going to My Computer, selecting a drive, clicking the Manage tab, and then clicking the Optimize button.
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The “Optimize Drives” dialog box will open, in which you will see a list of your drives and their current status (% fragmented).
In Windows 8/10, disk optimization is automatically assigned weekly. You can manually optimize or defragment a drive in Windows 8/10 by selecting it and clicking the Optimize button.
This will start the manual defragmentation process and you will see that Windows 8/10 takes two passes to move the fragmented data to the hard drive. You can also click the Analyze button to quickly update the fragmentation percentage value.
It’s worth noting that Windows can detect if the drive is a regular hard drive or SSD and will defragment accordingly. As I wrote earlier, you should not defragment your SSD as this can shorten its lifespan.
If you want to change the automatic optimization schedule, click Change Settings.
You can either delete the schedule to disable automatic defragmentation, or change it from weekly to daily or monthly. You can also select all drives or a specific drive for which you want to change the schedule. Finally, if you click the Select button, you can change if you want new drives to be automatically scheduled for optimization as well.
That’s all it takes to defragment drives in Windows 8 and Windows 10. For most people, the automatic schedule should work fine, but if you have a third-party tool or defragmentation just isn’t helpful, you can always turn it off in settings. Enjoy!
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