10 Gb hard drive (approx. half full) on a 450Mhz processor, “approx. 60% fragmented”, according to the defrag diagnosis.
The ‘temp’ folder has been emptied, along with the recycle bin and a whole swathe of cookies and temporary internet files.
Any other factors that would influence how long a defrag would take and that I could do something about beforehand? The last time I tried it, it was ticking away for over 24 hours and I had to abort - it shouldn’t take that long, should it?
Absolutely not. Several things could be wrong, but one is a background process that taps the hard drive, and makes the defrag program think that it’s changed. For this reason, disable your screen saver, and use Task Manager to see if any processes are running that are likely to do read/writes to the hard drive, and disable them as well.
On a system that doesn’t invoke it automatically first (I think the ones that do are Windows 2000 and XP and their descendants – someone can correct that), you should run Scandisk in the long check-disk-integrity version before defragging.
Polycarp, that makes a lot of sense, thank you. I’ll investigate at home tonight and disable the screen saver.
I’ve often wondered about the long list of things that seem to be running simultaneously when I check Task Manager - anti-virus (Norton), obviously, but there are plenty of other things which I don’t know what they do.
I should have mentioned it, but I’m running Windows 98.
Some older folk might remember that it’s one of those newfangled operating system doohickies.
Is there a recommeded way of booting up ‘clean’ to effectively disable all these things? Is this just f8 during start-up, safe mode, what?
Yes, I’m moderately computer-literate, but you might be forgiven for thinking otherwise, reading all this!
But the little light bulb went on when you mentioned background tasks - I suspect that the ol’ PC could be speeded up quite a bit if I paid attention to what it was actually doing!
Disable any anti-virus software. Lots and lots of itty-bitty files can really drag the process out too. What are you using to defrag, the one that comes with Win98? It’s rather inefficient but at least it works.
You can boot into safe mode so there are no extra programs running but I’ve seen it go slow in this mode too.
The problem here is the built-in defrag soft that comes with Win98. Try doing a search for some defrag software - anything is better than the MS one.
When I was using Win98, I always enjoyed using the defrag tool that came with Norton Utilities; it was fast and fun to watch it move the blocks around. Unfortunately good ol’ Norton Defrag doesn’t work nearly as well with 2000 or XP, in fact it moves VERY slow and doesn’t come with the cool benchmark feature anymore. sigh The good old days.
The Windows 98 defragmenter is notoriously finicky about anything running in the background, and it isn’t very efficient at defragmenting anyway. Download the trial version of Diskeeper, from Executive Software. You can run it in normal Windows mode, it is much more forgiving about background programs, and it is much faster. You can try it free for 90 days.
It’s safe to kill any process except Explorer and Systray. You might want to disconnect your network cable if you are on a LAN or cable modem. Also, disable automatic updates (in the control panel) and pause the task scheduler (which is buried in you programs menu somewhere). This should prevent defrag from having to restart, tho I don’t guarantee it.
windows XP defrag works pretty good imho. it would defrag a 80 gig hard drive with 1.33 athlon in about maybe 3 hours. and that without having to go through anything special like killing unneeded processes.
i remember with win98 i did have some sort of problems defraggin, but dont remember what they were. it might just have been the speed
It is safe to kill Systray too but Systray should not slow down the defrag process as it is just the Audio control icon on the system tray.
I defrag regularly using the Windows 98 utility and it works fine provided you have nothing running. Anything which writes to the disk will start the process all over again. If it only happens ocassionally it will not matter much because defrag just skips over the part which is already done but if something is writing al the time then defrag will never complete.
I’ve seen it take over 24 hours in Windows 98. It’s not THAT uncommon.
This is even with all background programs shut down, but admittedly the machine had never been defragged after about 2 years of use.
Well, if you watch defrag you can see if it’s just stuck on something large (like a folder with 1 million 5 byte files) or if it’s restarting over and over again.
10 gigs shouldn’t take that long though. A few hours at most. The type and amount of files on your drive will largely determine how long it takes. My 100 gig drive, 80% filled with my music library and various porn takes something on the order of 20 hours to defrag (which I do every half a year…maybe).
handy, does windows 98 come with a DOS version of defrag? I remember way back when I first switched to Win 95 I still have DOS 6.22 and I used THAT defrag instead of windows defrag and it converted all the invalid long file names to 8.3 file names…I lost my first install of windows that way
Defraging all 500 gigs of space on my computers takes too long so I almost never do it.
That is a Bad Idea[sup]TM[/sup]. The more information you have stored, the more screwed it can get if the disk gets fragged. You should get some defrag software instead of relying on the Windows defrag. I’m partial to Norton Utilities myself.
See - this is one of the reasons why The Straight Dope is such an excellent site.
I took the advice of downloading Diskeeper, and disabled everything apart from Systray and Explorer in Task Manager, then ran a defragmentation after Scandisk.
It took 28 minutes.
I noticed a difference in performance immediately and it’s fair to say that I’m stoked (pleased)! Thanks very much to everyone who took the time to help - you guys rock!
If you downloaded Diskeeper, you need not disable anything. Diskeeper will defrag w/o any further ado from you. I have it for “Set and Forget” and it schedules itself to defrag, usually every couple of hours. It takes only a few minutes even when I’m using the computer.
takes something on the order of 20 hours to defrag (which I do every half a year…maybe).