How often do you defragment your hard disk?

Absolutely it increases the speed to defragment your hard drive. Think of it this way. Pretend there are streets inside your hard drive and that every time information travels from point A to point B it causes the road to corrode. Every time you take information out or put information on your streets it leaves pot holes. After a while it becomes more and more difficult to travel those streets. You either have to slow down to drive through the pot holes or you have to take another route to go around them. When you defragment your hard drive it fixes the corrosion and pot holes and makes your streets smooth to drive on again and thus its faster for the information to travel. I hope this is an analogy that makes sense to you.

I do defragmentation once in 2/3 months before this i used to do daily/weekly most oftenly and my harddisk got crashed I donno what might be exact reason but i feared to do defrag very often.

I used to defragment the drive on a regular basis, but I have not done this for years now. I appreciate the value of defragmentation, but I usually overwrite the hard drive with my backup every couple of months to clean out all the surplus trash that has accumulated, so the drive does not really get the chance to fragment a great deal.

I just did a defrag overnight last night. I wasn't really having any issues with the computer, but I just decided to do it since it had been a really long time. It's one of those things I just kind of forget about. I haven't done too much on the computer today, so I haven't really noticed anything different about how it is running. I'm hoping that maybe it will run a little more quickly and smoothly.

I try to defrag my computer every few months. It really does help the speed of the computer, because there aren't a whole bunch of fragments of programs you deleted long ago that it has to deal with.

Yes it helps a lot. If it's been over a year since you last defragged, then there will be a noticeable difference in performance. It will however, take quite a bit longer. I typically defrag my comp once a week. I recommend the average person do it once a month. My analogy is different than the one above. It's like reading books at the library. You find a book, read it, then instead of putting it back on the shelf you leave it on a table. Then you read another book, leave it on a table. Then after going through 10 different books and leaving them strewn about, try to find that first book you read. It will take longer since your digging through a mess of books. The defragmenter puts all those books back on the shelf in a nice neat order so you don't have to spend as much time looking for them. This is similar to the way your computer looks for files and takes longer when the files aren't contiguous. I'm a librarian, so this is the easiest way for me to explain it to the people I work with.

I try to remember to do it every few months; however it takes all night! My hard drive is 35 gig and is used constantly to rewrite data; as a result, it's a mess! But I've been slacking off lately; I think I've only done it once in the last six months or year! Yikes--no wonder it's slowed down so much!

It's help to seek you files quickly. In that way it increase upto 20% speed of fragmented hard disk. But running it regularly will not increase that speed anyway. Remember it's not computer's speed, it speed up file/ reading and writing time of storage devices. If you have IDE hard disk try it once a month. And once a week if you have SATA. But i think you can see the best result after 1st you do that. It needs time to be fragmented.