Hello Carroll,

Monday, February 18, 2002, 3:29:38 AM, you wrote:

CG> 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
>>
CG> Alex:
CG> The reason for the restarts is that you are running some program that
CG> accesses the hard drive. So, before starting defrag, you've got to shut all
CG> of those unnecessary programs down. All that you should leave running are
CG> SysTray and Windows Explorer. There are programs that will do a reasonably
CG> good job (EndItAll is widely used and has always worked for me. Freeware.
CG> Sorry, I don't have a recent link, but I'm sure that Goggle will find the
CG> latest version quickly), or you can shut them down through CTL-ALT-DEL. If you're connected to the
CG> web, disconnect. Disable your virus scanner. You might even want to turn your
CG> screensaver off. Now you can start defrag. When it's done, reboot -- that
CG> will restore all of the killed services, although you might have to reset
CG> your screensaver.

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

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

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

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

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

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

CG> HTH,
CG> Carroll Grigsby

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Another problem happens to me. Celeron 600MHz, 230MB- RAM, 20GB-HD.
Heving several MPEG4 avi files about 700MB each, I defragged my
winchester (disk with Win98 about 5GB with ~50% free)and after 2 hours I got avi files
spoiled! Now they doesn't run in Win98, nor in Win2000.


--
Best regards,
 Yakymakha                            mailto:[log in to unmask]

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