How to Defrag HP Laptop with Windows 10 OS

Is it safe to defrag an HP laptop with Windows 10?

Defragment of your HP laptop is a beneficial maintenance activity of a computer that reorganizes dispersed and jumbled data to boost the efficiency of your device. When you delete, create, save, or move files from one place to another on your HP laptop's hard disk, these files can be broken into many blocks when you access them, which then will be stored in separate regions of your hard disc drive, so the disk becomes fragmented. A badly fragmented disk can significantly slow down computer performance.

However, defragment collects and rearranges data distributed across the system to make the disk perform more effectively. This process won’t harm your hard drive, we could even say that defragment is one of the simplest and safest ways to care for your HDD and guarantee your PC is optimized for better performance.

The defrag procedure can free up some space on your hard drive, which can be a major help if you're nearing the limit of hard drive space. It can also result in a more stable computing environment.

About HP laptop with SSD

You can find that we mentioned HDD in the last part. As you see, SSD now is gradually replacing HDD in desktops and laptops. If your HP laptop is in service in recent 3-4 years, the internal disk could be an SSD.

Here we sincerely suggest you: Do not defrag your SSD. It may even cause your SSD to reach the end of its usable life sooner.

Because SSD has no moving parts, data do not become fragmented across distinct cells like they do in HDD. When you defrag an SSD, you are wasting part of the limited program/erase cycles, which might cause the disk to age.

An SSD can be optimized to realize the improvement of disk performance. It has its way to clean up garbage files and rearranging them well. Users can enable the Trim function to maintain their SSDs. Trim orders can help SSD to recognize the files are useful or not and reduce the move times.

Besides Trim, users can also pay attention to the partition alignment which can align the file system format with the physical layer of the SSD, thereby increasing the life of the hard disk and using the hard disk space more efficiently.

How to defrag an HP laptop Windows 10

If your HP computer has HDD, then you can keep reading for the 2 methods of how to defrag HP laptop and how to set a schedule to defrag on your computer. Here we show you 2 tools: Defragment and Optimize Drives in Windows and a professional third-party tool.

Way 1. Use Windows built-in app

Running the defragmentation procedure on a Windows 10 desktop or laptop is simple. While this procedure is sometimes advised as part of an optimization process, you can defrag your computer by Defragment and Optimize Drives.

Step 1. Please type “Defragment” in the search bar. And click the “Defragment and Optimize Drives” to open it.

Step 2. Then the “Optimize Drives” window will appear. In the Status box, you can see all readable drives that are allowed to optimize and defragment.

Step 3. Select the drive you want to defragment. You can choose according to the “Current status” column.

Step 4. Click “Optimize” to defragment the selected drive. You need to wait for a while.

You can use the schedule defragment to set automatic to defrag.

Step 1. Click the “Change settings”, you’ll see a pop window. In this window, select the “Frequency” and the drives you wish to defragment regularly.

After you finish all settings, you can quit the application.

Way 2. Use professional defrag tool

Although the Windows tool is convenient, as you see, users can’t control the exact time, date. The defrag process might start when they’re working or running one more program, which can cause bad PC performance even data loss.

So, if you think the schedule defrag in Windows built-in tool is not good enough for you, we have a great alternative for you. AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional can give you a better experience. This software has a “Disk Defrag” function that not only allows users to defrag their HDD but also has a detailed defrag schedule for users. Users can decide the specific time, date, and frequency, even the fragment rate, the procedure will only start when your machine is idle (you can also set the idle time).

Let’s see more details.

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro, select the target disk or partition, and choose “Disk Defrag” or "Advanced" > “Defrag Partition”.

Step 2. In the pop window, you can see all your used drives. Because we need to set a schedule, you need to click the button “Schedule”, but you can also directly defrag the disk or partition if you want.

Step 3. In the schedule settings, you can select drives and the mode of frequency. Each mode has its setting options.

Step 4. After you set frequency and time, tick the “Condition” box and click “Define” to set fragment rate, idle time, and other details.

Then you can click “OK” to save all settings and back to the interface of defragmentation. In the list, you can see the target drive has its schedule now.

Wrap things up

Defrag HP laptop with Windows 10 system is a nice habit to protect your device, you can rely on tools to help you defrag your devices regularly. AOMEI Partition Assistant will help you do this job. By the way, it also supports Windows 11/10/8/8.1/7/XP/Vista and Server 2022/2019/2016/2012(R2)/2008(R2).