Jerry:
Here's a few tips:
1. Close down every program that is running in the background -- I do this
by working through all of the icons in the lower right. That includes virus
scanners and stuff like that. It's probably better to hit
control-alt-delete, and kill every absolutely non-essential program, but I
can never remember which one or two ditties I shouldn't kill.
2. Win98 defrag has a feature to optimize the placement of the files for
your applications by how often you use them. My advice is to turn it off.
3. Through the years, I've noticed that defrag hits a speed bump when the
drive is over half-full. If a drive is almost full, defragging can take a
long, long time.
4. Defrag goes much more quickly the more frequently that it is run --
things don't get so scrambled. (My wife wishes I would extend this principal
to my computer area, but...) I try to run it every week or two, and after
every major software reconfiguration, too.
5. A corollary to #4 is that the first time that a disk is defragged seems
to take a long time, too. That's probably because of all of the installation
activities that accompany a new disk installation.
6. Another lesson I learned the hard way - run scandisk before defragging.
While defrag does invoke scandisk, there is less aggravation if I verify
that the directory/file structure is intact first.
HTH -
Carroll Grigsby

----- Original Message -----
From: Jerry Fogelman <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, December 14, 2000 9:45 PM
Subject: [PCSOFT] Defrag & Scan Disk stalled


> I am running Windows 98 2nd edition on a 400mhz athlon w/64mg RAM. When I
> now try to defrag, it starts, gets to 5% then restarts. Get message "Drive
> contents changed, restarting". Scan disk does  a similar thing, continues
> to restart. I was able to run scan disc in dos. I have reinstalled Win 98
> with no success. Any help will be appreciated.
>
> Jerry

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