My goodness it was slow but it really looked as if it was going to work - my scandisk, preparatory to defrag, I mean. It got to 750,000 clusters (whatever they are) out of a total of 1,250,000 and then stopped, but completely. I waited for two more hours but it moved not one bit further.

I didn't want to restart from the beginning (as you might well imagine) but, with the faint hope that it might jump back fairly quickly to where it had got to, I did restart it. It didn't jump back over the stuff which had already been checked so I stopped it again.

I really don't want to spend more than thirty hours repeating the exercise only for it to stop again in the same place so i think I ought to try to tidy things up a little (eliminate .tmp and .chk files?) and go straight to a defrag.

Is it going to take a week? On another thread I see that the standard defrag (which made so little progress before) gets quite a good press if used with the advice which I have received here - i.e. in safe mode with the router disconnected and as much else turned off as possible. Do I go for it or is there really a better, quicker and less problematic product out there?

Dang! Not mentioned before in this thread, but have you run a disk clean up at all? Definitely should do that before any scandisk/defrag etc.
Ccleaner is a pretty good one, you have to read a bit about what not to delete, but it offers more options than the built in windows job. But I'd at least run the Windows Clean up utility, first, before downloading or installing anything else.

No, it has never been cleaned up! Partly because, being a non-computer person, I don't even know what the term means. Every now and then I get a visit from my daughter who knows a lot more but they are inevitably only short visits and there just isn't time.....

Tr clicking on "start">"programs">"accessories" then "tools" (or maybe "system tools"). About the second or third down should be "disk cleanup". Click it. There'll be whirring and grinding from the hard drive, and an application window will eventually open up with a range of options for file deletion, including temporary files, temporary internet files, recycle bin, maybe a few more.
Tick the checkboxes beside each one you're happy to have cleaned. (When you click on each one, a small block of general info will appear in the lower window regarding what's going to be deleted. Make your selections, click ok, wander away for 20min or so...it might take a bit less, or a fair bit more, if there are a lot of files.
Be interesting to see how many Mb can be gained from this, and if scandisk and defrag will work ok afterward.
How long has it been since you did a virus and antispyware scan? And how long did it take? And was anything found?
Mark.

AVG is on permanently and does a full check every day. The full check takes about twenty minutes and finds something no more often than once a year. I run Adaware every two or three days and it typically finds between one and three "critical" - but they're not, really - items each time. They're usually cookies which are there because someone else in the family has been running their favourite browser with cookies allowed. I don't allow cookies on my day-to-day browser.

I'm following your advice on the clean-up at the moment on my computer and 'll tell you how I get on. Thank you, once again.

Well, markjoy, it is in Spanish so doesn't quite tie in with your labelling of the different options but I have followed through "tools" etc. and have got to "liberador de espacio en disco duro" which is for freeing up space on the hard drive. The first thing it has done after being started up is to run scandisk, but in its simplest form. I'm watching and will intervene or report back long before it gets to thirty-two hours!

I am getting really concerned that all this intense prolonged activity is going to kill off your HD before you can achieve your aim!

You could well be right frostbit! However, thanks to help received here for which I am truly grateful - even though, to most of you who know what you're doing, it must all seem bl**dy obvious!

I followed your advice markjoy, thinking that what you were telling me to do was a sort of clean-up preparatory to running scandisk with auto repair etc which itself was to be in preparation for the W98 defrag utility. Well, within only a very few minutes, on its own initiative it started to run scandisk in its most basic manner and all went well and quickly then it went straight on to defrag and rushed through that so quickly that I wasn't present when it finished! I had been watching it scrolling down through lots of depictions of the files it was moving around so I'm convinced that it was going perfectly.

Now I find that it has decided that it wants to repeat the process automatically each day and won't, apparently, be dissuaded from that intention as there appears to be no box to untick so that I can do it manually( now that I know how to, thank you all!) whenever I think it appropriate. So frostbite's pessimism may well be justified!

There's no remedy for my ignorance, I'm afraid!

The controlling routine for the daily operation is NOT a part of defrag (I believe).

Sounds as if, somehow, you have invoked a utility in W98 that I can't recall the name of! It is designed to routinely run such stuff and you MAY find it by looking for a likely name in Control Panel.

I will stop digging this hole now and wait for someone who remembers the name of the blasted thing.

Try http://www.iopus.com/guides/winscheduler.htm

I'm suprised that it hasn't been asked before, but how full is the hard disk?

If over about 85-90% full, defrag can't run properly, as it hasn't enough free space to move stuff around. This is especially true of highly fragmented disks where the available contiguous free space is virtually nil.

SD

HDD is 19 Gb and the free space is 10.9 Gb - that's after the recent exercise.

I followed markjoy's instructions as best I could but there was nothing which was an absolutely exact translation of what he told me to look for, because I have Spanish Windows. Certainly what I ended up with appears to have been more comprehensive than expected, as I tried to explain higher up, and appears to have worked. I have since done some exploring in it's set-up criteria and believe that I have left it with instructions to repeat the exercise once a month with each step being separated by a day or two so that there is a chance for all to be completed in turn should I have the machine turned off at the exact time appointed for each.

Thank you all once again for your attention and advice. I hope to be able to repay by helping someone else with something within my areas of expertise some time in the future.

Real glad your persistence appears to have paid off, and glad to have been of help.
Mark.

Wow! thats a long time. I just got my system cleaned up after a lot of effort, been following ur thread. Though not as old as yours, mine was badly cluttered too. Never did anything about it till recently, the thing started hanging on every operation. As someone mentioned here, i didnt think it would affect performance , but i think it does, and badly so. I think i narrowly managed to avoid the drive from dying before i backed up.Going to get a new drive now and planning to prevent this fragmentation disease right from the start.

Well my HDD was about 75% occupied before the exercise - say 5Gb free and now I've got 10.9Gb free. Good Job, I'd say. My next little difficulty is that it said it was going to do it every day from now and there appears to be no little box which would give me the option of doing it only manually (because, apart from being unnecessary - very undesirable, even - on a daily basis, it wouldn't even work without being in safe mode, etc.). I have managed to get it down to once a month but will have to do better than that.

Did you look at #30? What was there in TS?

Sorry not to have got back to you earlier BOAC. There appears to be no equivalent of Task Scheduler in the Spanish version of W 98. Certainly not under Control Panel, so far as I can see.

Programs/accessories/system tools?

Surely there must be a mañana option.......................:)

There are several in the Irish version - just none with the same degree of urgency!! ;)

I can say that 'cos I'm from Dublin.

SD

Yes, thank you again BOAC, I have found something very similar under accessories. Will investigate further because at first glance it doesn't seem to have anything logged which refers to this maintenance procedure.