If you were rocking a Windows 95 PC back in the day, chances are you spent way too much time watching that hypnotic Disk Defragmenter animation—those little colored blocks sliding around trying to “optimize” your hard drive. It launched with Windows 95 in August ‘95, part of Microsoft’s push to make PCs more user-friendly. The idea was simple: as files got saved, deleted, and moved, your hard drive turned into a mess—defragging cleaned it up so things ran smoother. Windows 98 and ME made small improvements, but the core process stayed the same: sit, wait, and pray your computer didn’t freeze halfway through. It was slow, but it worked, and for a lot of people, it felt like maintenance that actually mattered.