Most machines have a ton of useless programs loading at startup, which may account for many of the little icons you see in the systray.  You can get a little free utility from www.pcmag.com/utilities called Startup Cop.  It tells you what is running, and where it loads from.  You can disable these programs and/or remove them entirely from the startup folder.  These little programs use up system resources, and it is not necessary to load most of them at startup.  It is not necessary to do defrag from safe mode to get it done right.  You can use this utility, or you can go to start/run and type in "msconfig" (without the quotes). Go to the startup tab and uncheck the boxes of the stuff you don't want to run at startup.  If you don't know what needs to run and what does not, you might kill something important, so Startup Cop is a much safer way to do it.  You can get Enditall from the same web site as Startup Cop, but Enditall will not permanently disable all that junk from running at startup, it just kills them until the next boot.  My personal preference is to have as little as possible run at startup to save resources and speed up the boot.  I've had Startup Cop since it was first released, and have never had a problem with it.  Your defrag shouldn't start over just because of the screensaver, but you can set it for no screensaver if you want.  Windows 98 is supposed to have some code in the registry to automatically disable a screensaver during a defrag, but it rarely works.

If you are going to do a defrag, which you should do weekly, you need to clean out your browser cache file, cookies, history, then your temporary internet files, and your temporary files first.  Otherwise you're rearranging a bunch of junk that takes up a lot of space on your hard drive. I've cleaned out these files for not-so-computer-savvy friends only to find upwards of 200-500 Mb of temp files.  Once I found a gig of this stuff.  If you clean it regularly, you'll have more space on your drive, and it will run better after you defrag it.  Ater you've cleaned the above, you should run scandisk before you defrag.  If you do the above routine once every 7 to 10 days, your defrags won't take very long, and your drive will run faster. If you're really feeling anal, use "find files", and type in "*.chk" (without the quotes) to find and delete incomplete file fragments.  There are many other nooks and crannies from which you can delete stuff, but most people will get most of the garbage just by emptying history, cookies, cache, temp, and temporary internet folders.

>OK, thanks for the advice. I made the mistake of leaving my screen saver and
>power management stuff on the first time I tried to defrag. I did turn them
>off the second time. There is bunch of programs in the (sys tray?) in the
>bottom right screen (this is Win 98 BTW). Do these count as running programs?
>I think what I'll do in the future is run it in Safe Mode. And I'll try and
>do regularly because I always forget and leave it for ages!
>
>
--




__________________________________________________________________
Your favorite stores, helpful shopping tools and great gift ideas. Experience the convenience of buying online with Shop@Netscape! http://shopnow.netscape.com/

Get your own FREE, personal Netscape Mail account today at http://webmail.netscape.com/

                  Visit our website regularly for FAQs,
               articles, how-to's, tech tips and much more
                          http://freepctech.com