stupid computer defrag question on Christmas day!

[silverlib]

I work at home on my computer and decided to defrag during the holidays. Defrag has been running since 2 p.m. yesterday and has never moved past 2%. The little boxes don't show up on details - it's a bland white page. Is defrag still working or is something terribly wrong? There are no error messages.

Merry Christmas to all, and thanks to anyone who might be able to answer this stupid question on Christmas day!

[Mika]

1. I hope you backed up your important files B4 defragging

How large is your drive?

[silverlib]

3. 127.0MB RAM

Its a pentium III 32-bit.

Under the "performance" tab, I'm told that resources are running low at 6% and some programs may not be able to run.

Do I just need to get some of the stuff off the hard drive?

Thanks for your response.

[Mika]

4. Um.. a modern hard drive is measured in GigaBytes (GB)

How many GB in total is your HD?

If your resources are down to 6% you need to clean up your system too. I can't help you there. I chucked pentium based PCs a long time ago, and I don't want to give you bad advice. I was just wondering if you have some super large drive that could take 24 hours to defrag, like a full 250GB or something.

[cam75219]

2. My mom's computer does that.......

I have to defrag it in safe mode. I'm not sure why it does that.

[Sven77]

5. stop that defrag!

pause then stop/cancel that defrag. Reboot your machine, press F8 (ithink) at the windows boot up screen to goto safe mode. Or boot up regular and ctrl-alt-del to bring up the processes. Cancel all unnessacary processes, they are accessing the disk drive and messing things up. I like O&O Defrag Pro Ed http://www.oo-software.com

What OS are you using ?

[silverlib]

6. Thank you!

I stopped it and rebooted. My system is operating normally again.

Thanks to everyone for the help. I will definitely not try this again.

[Mika]

7. You do need to defrag your drive once in a while though

It will speed things up.

[RC]

8. Do a disk check ---

Windows Explorer > Properties > Tools and Check now.

[asteroid2003QQ47]

11. Fear not the defrag.

Defragging Windows 98 was virtually impossible until I learned to defrag in safe mode only. If you have not defragged recently, it may take awhile but nothing like what you have been experiencing. Subsequent, and hopefully frequent, defrags will then be a piece of cake and you will be pleased with your machines improved performance.

[silverlib]

10. Windows ME

I looked up the O&O Defrag product, and this seems to be the only edition that is noncompatible.

I'm not a big ME fan, but this is what I'm stuck with for a while.

Thanks again, and Happy Holidays!

At least I'm not lagging in performance as of now. I'll shop around for some other defrag programs.

[TreasonousBastard]

14. Oops...

I answered before I saw you're already using ME.

Seems the ME defragger doesn't work well on ME for some reason. :wtf:

Diskeeper Lite may help, and googling will get a few answers from others with this problem on ME. There's a lot of discussion about it.

[Syncronaut Seven]

9. Your defrag program resets

every time a background process/program accesses the drive. You must manually shut down these processes, even find fast will do it.

Rebooting in safe mode makes for an easy defrag because it prevents any of those background programs from loading. Look in your system tray, do you see little program icons? That's probably what's going on.

I wouldn't be afraid to defrag, although it is always a good idea to back up critical files beforehand. A power failure during defrag can get pretty messy.

Personally, I Partition my big drives in to 4GB-20GB sections. One reason I do this is to make defrag much easier, I can even defrag "logical" drives while working with other "logical" drives with no resetting of the defrag process.

I also find that if I have my swap files and large frequently accessed files on their own drives my programs play nice without a lot of fragmentation and excessive swapping.

Harrad.

[underseasurveyor]

12. That's what I have to do

to run defrag. Nothing can be running, screensaver, antivirus program, etc. nuthin' or defrag will just continue to start, run a couple minutes, stop then restart.....over and over and over

For basic weekly maintanance I run a disk clean up, removes most clutter and frees up disk space. Then I check it for errors with a standard scan disk then I defrag it.

For the larger more in depth clean up jobs I call in the extra strength heavy duty cleaner. My husband :-)

[TreasonousBastard]

13. If you're still using Win98...

a lot of us know the defragger that comes with it is the pits, and the defragger in Win ME works a lot faster and better.

M$ doesn't seem to have it available on their site any more, or it's well hidden, so here are some links to get it:

http://www.sandylee.net/computers/defrag.html

http://surecool.com/
http://www.lurkhere.com/~nicefiles/index.html

Lots of discussions on this all over the place, and it's been talked to death at alt.comp.freeware and the windows groups.

Google _groups_ "windows me defrag" and variations on the theme and find out all sorts of good stuff.