My parents purchased me a new desktop computer as a high school graduation gift. I used that clunky old HP with it’s 15 inch monitor for six years of higher education and it served me well… most of the time.
During my Junior year at Graceland I was experiencing some serious speed and performance deficiencies. I asked my trusty roommate Johnny C for his advice and the first word from his lips was one I’d never heard before… defragment. When he asked me when I’d last defragged my hard drive I replied with a simple never.
So he walked me through the simple process and told me it was best to just leave it be and let it do it’s thing.
So I left it.
Seconds turned to minutes.
Minutes to hours.
Hours to days.
And finally, after 63 hours the fan stopped humming, the screensaver ceased it’s bouncing, and a note proclaiming that the C: defragment is compete appeared.
63 hours.
From then on, I followed Johnny Cs advice and defragmented monthly. The next month the same process took seven minutes.
It struck me that this ongoing tuneup was not that dissimilar to so many other areas in life. Keep up with them and the outcomes are predictable – exercise, sleep, hobbies, oil changes, vegetable consumption, lawn mowing, church going, and on and on and on. But let something slack, and the only outcomes will be performance deficiencies and some serious time to reboot your systems.