Number 206 - July 2000
Win98 Defragging1
from Golden Triangle PC Club, Beaumont, Texas
    Q. I had tried Disk Defragmenter on my computer a couple months ago without any problem, but when I tried it yesterday, my computer froze at 10 percent complete. I reset my computer, turned off the screen saver and tried it again, but it did the same thing. There were no virus scanners in the background and no other program running. What can I do next to accomplish the task? My computer is a Compaq, Pentium II, 333-megahertz with Windows 98.

    A. The answer to this can be found at the Microsoft Knowledge Base at support.microsoft.com, in article [at] http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/ q186/9/78.asp

    Basically, you weren't patient enough. Windows 98 has a different way of defragmenting a hard drive than Windows95, and part of the process slows the computer down to the point that it appears to not be responding.

    With a traditional disk defragmentation process, the files on the computer are placed sequentially, one after the other, so there are no gaps in between. But with Windows 98, the operating system arranges your files so that the most-used items are placed on the fastest part of the hard drive.

    To do this, Windows keeps a series of logs showing which programs you use most. It then reads these logs and rearranges the files accordingly. Your best fix:go get a cup of coffee, take a jog around the block or call an old friend.

    The more you use the computer, the more extensive these log files become. That's why your first defrag effort went quickly, and the next one seemed to hang up.
    Another option is to use the Norton Utilities' Speed Disk, which does the same thing but much faster.

1 TOGGLE Editor's Note:

    If you are a beginner, you may not know what this is about. If you do, skip to the next article.

    File Fragmentation: When your computer saves files it searches for free space anywhere it can find it on your hard disk. If something (like a temporary file) has been erased, its space on the disk has been released and the new file may be saved in the vacated space. If the space is not large enough to take the whole file, part may be saved there and the rest saved somewhere else on the disk. The computer keeps track of all this, but your files may become so badly fragmented that they take much longer to seek out and load when you need them, slowing down your computer operations.

    The procedure described in the article above is fine if it works for you. It didn't work for us, so we were tickled pink when Carl Tenning submitted the following article, which we first printed in the March 2000 TOGGLE. Since it is relevant to the subject just discussed we are reprinting it here in case you missed it.

    What was happening, during our attempts to defragment our hard disk, was repeated re-starts after 2% to 3% completion and an occasional error message that some program was still running in the background, even though we thought we had meticulously shut everything down and disconnected the computer from the Internet. The procedure in the article below worked for us.
  Number 206 - July 2000