On Sunday 17 February 2002 05:04 pm, you wrote:
> A couple of days ago I decided to defrag my hard drive because I hadn't
> done it in a while. The problem is it kept restarting over and over again
> because 'the drive contents had changed' even though I wasn't doing
> anything on computer while it was defragging. Is this normal? It did defrag
> the whole drive eventually but it took around 4 hours. My hard drive is
> 20gb, by the way. I don't know the speed of it.
>
> Alex Onslow
>
Alex:
The reason for the restarts is that you are running some program that
accesses the hard drive. So, before starting defrag, you've got to shut all
of those unnecessary programs down. All that you should leave running are
SysTray and Windows Explorer. There are programs that will do a reasonably
good job (EndItAll is widely used and has always worked for me. Freeware.
Sorry, I don't have a recent link, but I'm sure that Goggle will find the
latest version quickly), or you can shut them down through CTL-ALT-DEL. If you're connected to the
web, disconnect. Disable your virus scanner. You might even want to turn your
screensaver off. Now you can start defrag. When it's done, reboot -- that
will restore all of the killed services, although you might have to reset
your screensaver.

Note that many people prefer to run defrag in safe mode. While I've never
done it that way, it seems like an excellent method. The only downside that I
can see is the need for an additional reboot.

It can take a long time to defrag a disk -- especially if it has been a long
time since the last defrag. There are ways of speeding the process, however:

1. Check the setting for an option relocate your most commonly-used
applications to improve performance -- setting this to ON will make the
defrag process take much longer, and I'm dubious that any performance gain
will be noticeable (as always, YMMV).

2. Clean up your drive before defragging -- under Maintenance, there's a
utility that will get rid of a lot of temporary files; there are also third
party utilities that will clean even more useless stuff.

3. Defragging frequently -- particularly after install/uninstall sessions -- can make a
big difference.

4. While clicking on the Show Details option will slow the process down
slightly, at least you'll have something to watch -- sort of like an
electronic lava lamp. Four hours of it, though, is apt to fry your brain. :^)

HTH,
Carroll Grigsby

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