My father seems to be having the same problem with Windows Defragmenter that I had on my old computer (for the record, he uses Win2000, I had Win98). The problem is simply that it only seems to work when it wants to. About 75% of the time it’ll start up and just recycle itself over and over; for instance, it’ll scan up to 1% of the hard drive, start over, and maybe get up to 2% the next time before it starts over, etc. and by the time it gets up to 10% or so it never seems to go any higher no matter how many hours you let it run. I’ve turned off the screensaver, task manager, antivirus protection, everything. I’ve even went in to task manager and closed all applications except those necessary to run just the basic Windows shell. I’m presuming we’re not the only ones who have experienced this problem. Any suggestions?
There might be some process running that isn’t visible to task manager.
Try booting into safe mode* and running the defragmenter there.
*On most Windows computers, booting into safe mode is just a case of holding down <F8> while it starts up, then selecting Safe Mode from the menu, but if this doesn’t work, you can (on XP, at least, maybe 2000 too) click Start>Run and type MSCONFIG then check the /safeboot option in the Boot.INI tab.
I don’t wish to be insulting, but - You’re positive your Dad’s using Windows 2000, not Windows ME (Millennium Edition?) It’s a common mistake.
How many hours did you allow it to run? The “starting over” phenomenon under Win98 did slow things down a lot, but even so, it usually did work eventually - like if left to run overnight.
For what it’s worth, Windows 2000 does not include the MSCONFIG utility. At least, my installation doesn’t. But I agree that if you’re having this sort of problem, running defrag in Safe Mode (via the F8 key during boot) is generally a good idea. My own Windows 2000 PC has never had this problem with the defragmenter.
On thinking about it, there are other options in the Boot.ini tab that might also be worth selecting for the purpose of this exercise.
For Win98, hold the left shift key rather than F8 to boot into safe mode
I’ve found Power Defrag to be very effective.
Never got the Windows Defrag to finish in XP.
Note: Please exercise caution when using system utilities.
Erg. It is Millenium Edition. Nonetheless, I experienced the exact same thing in Win98: endless restarting. I guess a more relevant question is: has anyone actually been able to get this thing to work consistently, and if so were there any tricks you had to pull to do so?
I used Windows ME for a while. I seem to hazily recall that there was a system process called System Restore. In theory, this would back up critical system files as a background task. In practice, it would consume excessive disk space, and fail to provide any useful service when you needed it. (Just my personal experience, of course.) It would also interfere with the operation of the disk defragmenter.
I’d suggest that you disable System Restore at least temporarily, reboot the machine in safe mode (as per Mangetout’s suggestion - Windows ME does include MSCONFIG), start the defragmenter and plan to let it run for a long time. Like at least 4-8 hours.
With all this bother, though, you may actually reconsider the need to run the defragmenter in the first place. Most folks will get by OK without running it more than a few times a year.
I’ve been told that if you download a lot of files, delete them, and download more on a frequent basis this could escalate the need for defragmenting. T or F?
Hello. I hope this helps with some of your defragmenting concerns.
If I remember the Windows Defrag program correctly, it restarts whenever Disk I/O is detected. That is, if it sees new data written to disk, it restarts the defragment to take this new data into account. If you still want to use the Windows defragmenter, I would suggest two things:
1: Before running defragment, end all processes that might acuse disk activity. You might want to end all processes except Defrag itself.
2: begin the defrag before you go to bed at night, the less activity your system is seeing, the less probability the program will restart due to a rewrite.
Personally, I would reccomend a better, more robust defragmenting solution. The Windows defragmenter is not only fairly brain-dead (due to the restarts on disk write), but it does not defragment the page file (virtual memory) nor the master file table. Both of these actions speed up data access significantly, especially under low-memory conditions.
The product I use is Raxco PerfectDisk. It defragments all data possible to defragment, and I’ve experienced greatly reduced boot times and increasd performance (I don’t work for Raxco or anything, I’m just a VERY satisfied user).
In terms of the necessity of defragmenting, think of it this way:
The average time needed to access any random piece of data on the disk is 1/2 a turn of the platter (It’s a calculus problem). If you have many random accesses of the disk to access fragmented parts of the file, you are wasting a good amount of time due to disk latency. If all the data of the file is available in contiguous sections, you remove that delay.
I have disk defragments scheduled every other night at 4:00AM when I am sleeping (usually).
I hope this helped!
Probably true, but how much is “a lot of files?” Is he filling up a 40GB disk and cleaning it out again every week?
We’ve got a Windows e-mail/file server in my office that has never been defragmented since it was set up in 1998 or so. It is a little slow, but it works fine.
Most people who worry about doing this every week to their desktop PCs are worrying too much, IMHO.
It’s been awhile, but I seem to recall that you can download Diskkeeper lite for free from http://www.diskeeper.com . I’ve used it for years and find it to be an amazingly stable product that does an excellent job of defragging my XP machine.
Well, he’s dating a woman with a 16 year old stepson who visits… not necessarily a lot of porn sites, but hacking sites, etc. - the kind of thing where they are constantly installing new diallers and programs and things on their PC.
As for myself, on my old PC I only had a 3.2GB hard drive. I used to download MP3s from the newsgroups - usually entire albums worth at a time - listen to them one or two times apiece, delete, and repeat process. Needless to say I used to do a lot of defragmenting and had a better success rate getting the program to work, but it did usually take anywhere from 2-6 hours at a time. Sounds like the best bet is to get another defrag program. But why would MS bundle something this worthless with their operating systems?
Adding to Skorz’s wisdom, make especially sure that the screensaver is off - if any disk I/O is detected, the defragmenter starts out fresh. Boot in safe mode and disable all unnecessary drivers / processes.
I have never had any problems defragging in win 98 SE but then again I am not runnnig all the junk other people are running. Termanite all programs and it should run OK. In the worst of cases I suppose you could also disable the swap file.
I don’t wish to appear argumentative, but it bears mentioning that it’s possible to render a Windows PC un-bootable by disabling the swap file, particularly if the PC has less than 64MB or so of RAM.
I wouldn’t do this.
(Well, not again!)