defrag question
 

so i'm running win98 FE (yes i know it sucks) and last night i decided to defrag my HDs. i woke up this morning to the sound of my HDs still cranking away 9 hours later only to look at the screen and see that the defrag hadn't even started yet!!! it was still checking the drives for errors. scandisk keeps restarting itself every time the drive gets written to. can anybody give me some suggestions as to how i might get the POS to run right?

Why don't you turn off your scan disk and yes defragging takes for ever, especially if you have a huge hard drive, i.e. 120 gigs etc.

-Joe

PS: If you can, get Win2k Pro. Best POS MS ever made. A lot more stable but won't play some of your older games.

There are a couple of things you can try.

1. Boot in safe mode and run scan disk and see if it works - btw scandisk may fail if you don't have enough free disk space to work with.

2. You can do <ctrl>-<alt>-<del> and end task on everything except explorer and systray.

3. Ensure you don't have a virus, since such things can eat up valuable memory.

Good Luck.

[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by HomerJay [/i]
[B]Why don't you turn off your scan disk and yes defragging takes for ever, especially if you have a huge hard drive, i.e. 120 gigs etc.

-Joe

PS: If you can, get Win2k Pro. Best POS MS ever made. A lot more stable but won't play some of your older games. [/B][/QUOTE]

If he's running W98 FE then I'm going to guess he doesn't have 120 GB HDD.

I agree with you that Win2K pro is the most stable OS that MS has ever made. I can usually get it to play old dos games too (I love Masters of Orion)!

Tim, run scan disk on your own first, and then defrag...

-Gagan

Lose WIN98!

Enough said...that OS is the worst POS evar!

I agree on WIN2K. It is great for the home usage!

Andy

why do you guys recommend 2000 over XP?

Buy Executive Software Diskeeper. It replaces the defrag that comes with the OS. I had the same experience. This product would work when the builtin defrag would not.

Concur with MS Win2K. It doesn't require activiation like Win XP does. After I replaced Win ME with 2k, all my problems went bye-bye. I also reformatted the disk using NTFS. You need to lose FAT!

[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by Steppin Razor [/i]
[B]why do you guys recommend 2000 over XP? [/B][/QUOTE]

yeah?

I sure as hell don't

If you want the XP hookup, lemme know. I got Profesional version, and the crack... also should still have Office Xp around here...

Unless Dan hasn't given it back.

-Gagan

[size=1][i]Originally posted by Steppin Razor [/i]
[B][color=purple]still cranking away 9 hours later only to look at the screen and see that the defrag hadn't even started yet!!! it was still checking the drives for errors. scandisk keeps restarting itself every time the drive gets written to.
[/color][/B][/size]
Make absolutely certain that no other programs are running in the background. I ran into the same problem a while back when I forgot about SETI@home. Defrag would start all over again every time the app calculated some more data and wrote to disk.

If you're not sure what might be running in the background, press CTRL+ALT+DEL once for the Close Program dialog box to come up. It'll present you with a list of open apps. If you don't recognize the name of the program running, [i]don't[/i] shut it down without finding out what it is first.

Good luck. :)

--
[color=red]^[/color][color=blue]ww[/color][color=red]^[/color]
"[color=blue]...axles of evil...[/color]" - George W. Bush

[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by Varx [/i]
[B]Buy Executive Software Diskeeper. It replaces the defrag that comes with the OS. I had the same experience. This product would work when the builtin defrag would not.

Concur with MS Win2K. It doesn't require activiation like Win XP does. After I replaced Win ME with 2k, all my problems went bye-bye. I also reformatted the disk using NTFS. You need to lose FAT! [/B][/QUOTE]

Can you elaborate about how XP needs to be activated? I heard something about MS not allowing updates for multiple instances of a serial number or something along those lines.

Win2000 does not have the activation crap (built in) that XP does. I also prefer W2K over XP, but for games and compatabilty issues, XP is better.

If you have a fairly slow machine, you might stay with an older system though, even though they do suck. I've found that w2k or XP really do eat up quite a bit of cpu and memory.

As to the defrag, you can do a control/alt/delete and kill things (applications only), but that will not get much. I would suggest a utility such as "Killtasks" or one called dllmanager. These will see what is running and you can kill them one by one. MS systems run a ton of crap in the background, and on a 9x system, there is no way to see what is actually running with a out of the box OS.

Safe mode may be easier....

I would take 2000 over XP any day of the week. I have 2 machines here at home, on with XP Pro, and one with WIN2K. I have 300 brand new machines at work with WIN2K. It is a cleaner GUI with more features geared towards the "Meat and potatoes" user.

As a Windows Sysad, I can tell you that I would take WIN2K...hands down.

If you like all of the bells and whistles of XP, then go that way...the fact is, that if you are into Windows, the NT kernal rocks...as long as it is couples with NTFS HDD format...

But to hell with Gates...I wanna build up a fat ass Linux box to run a mail server and a web/MYSQL server...

Andy