If you are permanently connected to the internet, disconnect your modem from your system, otherwise defrag will keep sopping and starting. Also do not run any other applications durng scandisk and defrag.
First clean up the disc by deleting temp and temperary internet files.
Click 'Start' then 'Run' and type in 'Scandisk', this check your drive has no folder problems.
Once scandisk has finished, Click 'Start' then 'Run' then type in 'defrag'.
Forget about the windows defragger. Its very slow 10GB can take a few hours as it restarts if there are any background processes running.
Suggest you buy diskkeeper, v good.
But never noticed much difference on modern pc's using NTFS, unless v busy & full hard drive
Also, before doing a Defrag I have been advised it would be a bit quicker if you make your background 'None' and your screensaver 'None'.
This can be done by right clicking on your desktop and going to Properties.
most of the advice above is news to me !
disconnect your modem ? no background ?
pish and tosh - just follow the initial advice offered.ive never had any problems defragging
Set your screen savers to none and make sure in power properties that your hard disks are not set to turn off after 30 mins etc, set to never then go to: start/accessories/system tools/defragmentor. If you dont set the scrren savers and power settings as mentioned before it will probebly hang and you'll have to start all over again which is a lengthy procces depending on your hard drive size.
I think the turning off background/power-saving/modems etc etc is from the Windows 9x days where any activity that wrote data to the disk would cause the defrag to start again. As cetti said, the easiest way to run defrag for a windows 9x system is to run it in safe mode. Windows 2000/XP machines should defrag OK even if data is being written to the dard drive but it will take longer. At work we run script that defrags the machines while it is shutting down (just before it switches off). Running scandisk is a bit of an overkill but running disk cleanup is highly recommended. Diskeeper is very good but Windows disk cleanup and defrag are free.