Originally Posted by DBTL
Defrag et. al: of no consequence.
Oh?
In that case, perhaps you'd like to explain why a laptop that was regularly crashing was sorted by clearing the deleted files folder, removing a load of junk from the temp folder, removing the swap file, defragged to get the disc back to having some sensible contiguous space, then reallocated the swap file, which promptly expanded considerably from the size it had been before this was all done.
Ok, ideally the user should have upgraded to a new disc with an extra 20 Gb of space on it, but it wasn't an option at the time, and this procedure sorted the crash issue, and kept it going for the next few months until a sensible upgrade could be taken.
The crash was being caused by the swap file trying to expand and not being able to because of a severe problem with non contiguous space, and the error message was less than helpful as to the real reason. Long experience of working with PC's was the way we found this and resolved it.