So what is this Windows 8 on ARM business anyway? ARM (ARM Holdings, plc) is a British chip designer whose processors have powered the world’s smartphones and tablets for many years already. With Windows 8, Microsoft has engineered a version of the operating system (OS) specifically for these processors.

The advantage of the ARM version is that it doesn’t need maintaining. The automated maintenance tool built in to the OS will be all you need, and updates won’t come down to the platform in the way they do with the traditional versions of Windows. Instead, the experience of using a Windows 8 tablet will be much more similar to that of using a Windows Phone.

If you are using a Windows 8 tablet with an ARM processor, you will only have a solid state storage device, which will never need defragmenting; all Apps will be tested for compatibility and malware, so you have fewer stability and security problems; and traditional desktop software simply won’t install.

It’s fairly clear that maintenance on the ARM versions of Windows 8 is pretty much something that you don’t need to worry about.

Windows 8 includes a new automatic maintenance tool (see Figure 1) that performs actions on a specified schedule, including searching for updates, performing antivirus scans, and running system diagnostics. You can find the Automatic Maintenance tool in the Maintenance section of the Action Center.

Figure 1. The Automatic Maintenance tool in Windows 8

For casual users this tool should be all you need; however, enthusiasts and IT professionals will probably want to have more control over the removal of temporary files, defragmentation, and so on.

When you open the Maintenance section in the Action Center, you see a link to Change Maintenance Settings. This is slightly misleading because there are two options: the time each day when the tool runs, and if the computer is plugged into an electrical outlet, the computer is allowed to wake from sleep to perform the task.

There is no visible indication that maintenance is running except for a small static timer icon that appears on the Action Center icon on the Taskbar.

So, does defragmenting your disks actually make a difference? Certainly it does with conventional hard disks. But if you have a solid state disk (SSD) in your device, then no, it has no impact at all. These drives are random access, much like the memory in your computer; thus, there’s no performance benefit to defragmenting. In fact, because SSDs have a finite write life, it can be argued that defragmenting them only reduces their lifespan, which is quite correct in my view.

For mechanical hard disks, however, fragmentation does occur. When your computer writes small files to the disk, the file system puts them in the best available place. However, when you save large files, there may not be enough contiguous space for the entire file to be stored as a single entity. What happens then is that Windows stores part of the file in one block and other parts in other available spaces, as illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2. A depiction of fragmented and contiguous files

There are no problems with files being fragmented, because with modern hard disks, there’s no real risk of data corruption. But, fragmentation can and will slow down access to the files slightly (which makes sense), so if access speed is important to you, especially with Windows operating system files, then regularly defragmenting your computer is advised.

The good news is that Windows 8 can automatically defragment your hard disks. But if you want more control—perhaps you prefer determining what hard disks or partitions are defragmented and how often it’s done—you can change the settings manually.

To change the defragmentation settings, open the Start screen and search for defragment. The Defragment Your Hard Drive link will appear in the Settings search results. Click this link to open the Optimize Drives window. When you run the defragmenter, the window displays the fragmentation status of each hard disk and partition in the computer.

Click the Change Settings button to open the Optimization Schedule window (see Figure 3), in which you can choose when the defragmenter runs, if you want to be notified if the defragmenter fails to run three consecutive times, and what hard disks and partitions are included.

Figure 3. The disk defragmenter in Windows 8