When I run a defrag on the 27 Gig drive of an old PC with Windows 98 it only takes some 10 minutes, dutifully shows how every byte is corrected, and never complains it could not cope with any of the files to fail to defrag.
When I perform such a defrag using wonderful Windows XP with SP2 and all the patches suggested by MS it takes some 50 minutes to defrag around 15 Gig of the 40 Gig drive, leaves great gaps untouched and always complains it could not cope with a number of files it fails to defrag. I wonder if the new marvellous Windows Vista will perform any better.
Does anyone know of a FREE bit of software that can safely do a proper defrag job under Windows XP which I can download?
Gordon
I think Vista will get worse, but XP isn't as bad as you think it is. 98 packed everything near the front of the disk, or back, not sure which. XP just puts together the fragments wherever it has room. The thing is that it doesn't slow it down much because one of hte big developments from 98 to XP was the way that the OS better predicted what you you use from the drive and pre-loaded it into RAM.
Those files that it couldn't defragement were probably in use by the register or something The best defragmenter I've used for Windows was System Mechanic. It's not free, but it's pretty cheap and does more than just defragment the disk. It does a boottime defragmentation so it can do everything.
Afaik WinXP defrag (and other newer defrag alternatives) distribute the files all over the disk in order to
reduce future fragmentation, because the files will then have space to grow sequentially. This might only be the case with NTFS though, but if that's your file system it's no wonder anyway.
Defragmentation has nothing to do with stacking all the files in one end of the drive
Rather it makes sure all parts of a particular file follow directly after each other on the disk, to improve file system performance.
Personally I use Raxco PerfectDisk, although I've only used it once during the past half year or so - you don't need to defrag often on newer file systems, unless you mess around with removing/adding files alot. It isn't free tho.
When looking for an alternative defragger, check to see that it uses Windows API defrag routines ("MoveFile" or something). If it does that, you can be sure that it won't mess stuff up (well, almost sure anyway), and that you can access the disk while it's being defragged.
Thanks for all your advice guys. I was ignorant of the fact the XP Defrag was not supposed to tidy uo all the files by moving them to the start like Win 98.
To be honest the real problem is the PC fails to startup everytime and displays the complex blue window errors sometimes, probably because the 5 year old drive is nearly knackered. I will upgrade in the Spring I expect when they get Vista sorted out. But your help in the other thread here has put me off having a 64 bit CPU as I love rinning loads of old stuff and I am not lashing out on a 64 bit version of MS Office etc.
Gordon
Try run a ScanDisk (or whatever they call it this day, right click on the drive in my computer, properties, somewhere there I think) with full surface check, and see what it says. If it says the drive is all right, reinstalling windows might help, especially if you've had the same install running for many years.
DOS - Windows 3.1 was chkdsk
Windows 95 - Me recommended scandisk
XP doesn't have scandisk and went back to chkdsk
Which is good for me because I hate consistancy.