What are Hard Disk Utilities?

There are many hard disk utilities that can help you maintain and repair your hard drive. Hard disk drives are mechanical devices that will eventually break. The repetitive process of deleting and creating files on a disk will lead to fragmentation that will cause your drive to work harder. You might even have accidentally deleted a file. These situations and more can be mitigated by the judicious and timely use of these programs.

Microsoft Windows provides many useful disk utilities. There are also free programs that can help you maintain your disks. And of course, there are also some very good utilities available for a reasonable price. It all depends upon what your needs are.

What follows is a sampling of utilities you might find useful.

Free disk utilities from Microsoft

• Defrag is used to clean up a fragmented disk.



• CHKDSK checks the file system and the media surface.



• ScanDisk was only used from MS-DOS 6.2 through Windows Me.



• Undelete is an MS-DOS program that will recover files that have been accidentally deleted. It is only found in MS DOS 5.0 – 6.22.



• Backup - This is a simple program to help you backup your hard drive.

Windows XP Disk Utilities

The image below shows three disk utilities that come with Windows XP. To open this menu, go to windows explorer, right-click on the the disk you want to work on, and select properties. In the properties windows, select the tools tab.

Other disk related utilities

If you've emptied your recycle bin, you will need a Windows Undelete program to recover the lost files.

If you need to erase sensitive files, do not count on the regular OS utilities, such as the Recycle Bin, to erase your file from the disk. You will need a file erase or wipe utility that makes your file unrecoverable.

If you do web surfing you will occasionally want to clean out your browser disk cache and history files. Your browser will have settings that specify how much disk space is used for these purposes.

The registry is the master application database for Windows. All programs will use the registry for various purposes. If you have installed and uninstalled many programs on your computer, you will want to run a registry cleaner because the registry can become corrupt over time. Many mysterious problems have been fixed merely by cleaning up the registry. RegCure is a reliable program to clean your registry.

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