HARD-DISK Tricks

Physical disk and logical disk. A hard disk is a physical disk, meaning a unit of magnetic memory. The total area that can register information can be divided into several logical disks, for a more efficient use. In MS-DOS and Windows, each logical drive is associated with a point followed by the symbol ":" after a simple rule: with the letters A and B we note the floppy disk and start with the letter C: the logical disks. After logical disks, the next letters are used by CD-ROM, pen drives and other similar devices that could exist in the system.

Available space on your hard disk. It is useful to know what space is available on the hard disk, in case he gets too small and you decide to replace him with one more, or if you want to know how much space you have. Open My Computer and you will immediately have a picture of your computer disks. From menu, choose View / Details to see the parameters required. It is possible to have more hard disks, or the hard drive to have more logical disks and then you will see more of the same icon labeled C:, which says Local Disk drive but each has a different letter. For each of them you will see the total subscribed and space (Total Size), and remained free space (free space).

Capacity hard disk is measured in Megabytes and Gigabytes, ie multiples of the byte. A byte (pronounced bait) should not be mistaken for a bit. A bit is a binary digit which can only have values 0 or 1, while a byte is a binary 8-bit and has a value between 0 and 255. One megabyte (1MB) has 1024KB and GigaByte has 1024 MB. Currently, a hard disk has a few medium-sized GB. By 2002 I have worked well for months, with a computer processor 486, which have a hard disk 400 MB, which is ridiculously little compared to PCs with Pentium processor today. So small hard disks are not even manufacturing today. In fact, already started to disappear from the market hard drives of less than 10 GB!

How big should your hard disk? If you bought a computer without knowing much about him, you were probably happy with the size of hard disk contained in the computer offered for sale. But there are moments in which you will need a larger hard disk, so you will start asking for a larger one. But how big? The answer depends on what you do with your computer, and how effectively you use the space on the disk. If you want to use the PC only for training, or accounting, then a hard disk of 80 GB will be enough. If you want to make development programs and other technical and scientific applications, then you probably need about 160 GB. But if you want to put games on your PC all the rage, which occupy hundreds of GB each, it is assumed that you need a hard drive and more.

Do not let the hard drive is to fill up! It is highly recommended as a hard disk is not allowed to fill to over 80% of capacity. It will work even if it fills more than 90% of capacity, but you find that your PC will work much slower. This happens because the operating system uses space on your hard disk for temporary storage of data during the work. If not enough space available, the operating system will slow down. Do not be surprised if it will freeze! So check from time to time remaining free space on disk and delete the unused files. And do not forget: the files are actually removed only after you empty the Trash Bin.

Can I delete files without fear? To do "clean" the hard disk, you can delete certain files that are not necessarily required. First, Empty "Trash", where all files are deleted: Right-click the Recycle Bin and choose Empty Recycle Bin. And then delete temporary files in directories (C: TEMP, C: WINDOWS TEMP), after that you make sure that among them is not something you put in storage or that might be useful. Also, any file whose name begins with the tilde ("~") is a temporary file was not closed because of any system errors, and you can delete them.

Backup. This term means “safety copy”, so do it as often as possible, to have an option in trouble. Computers "crack" sometimes because of operating system errors, sometimes due to a physical failure of any vital components, or even because of any current banal feathers, and there is risk to lose data hard disk. If you have important data on your hard disk, make sure you backup them regularly. From time to time (especially if these files change), renew the copy! You can copy important files on DVDs, and if the volume of data is higher, you can backup to another hard disk or on another computer.