Ive heard alot of things about something called 'Hard-Drive Defrag'. If I defrag my hard-drive, does that also wipe it? Or is it something else entirely?

Defrag does not wipe your hard drive. In a nutshell, defrag puts all file segments in chronological order for faster disk access.

Defrag explained http://www.mcsbrockville.com/web/pages/techcustomer-support/misc-documents/defrag-explained.php Do yourself a favor BACKUP!

... what have you been hearing? Plenty of information available We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true

highly recommend you defrag regularly. It is one of many computer maintenance tasks [like backup your files] that really save you a lot of wasted time and money. Give a person a fish you feed them for a day. Ask a person to internet search and they learn a skill for a lifetime.

except when you de-frag and the computer loses or messes up some of your files - I've had that happen - more than once .... I know everyone says I should de-frag, and that it won't change anything - but since I had to spend 3 days fixing what de-frag messed up -i avoid it. And that, among other things, is the reason to be sure to BACK UP your work on a regular basis. :) good luck ....

There's no denying defragmentation is beneficial, but folks tend to elevate its importance beyond the role of disk optimization - I have a lot of systems - defragging is something I only perform occasionally, yet I've lost neither money nor time, and certainly have had no problems that could be attributed to fragmentation. On a flakey system, defragging is not a good idea - you are basically rewriting nearly every scrap of data on the hard drive - if that data is not reproduced faithfully... Backups are advisable under any circumstances We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true