I'm now paying the price HELP!! is needed please

Posted by: oldie on 05 April 2004

For the last 18 years or so I have always had my computer technicians to do every thing for me,so I've never had to touch the "Bloody things" untill I retired, now of course I'm paying the price of "blissful ignorance".The problem I have is,[well one of my problems,before anyone else points them out] I have tried to de frag my computer and all that happens is, as it starts up[I think] I get a flash on the screen and then nothing. I have managed to defrag it sometime ago,so it does work, well that time it did, but this time all I get is just the flash.I have tried to set it to work on the maintainance program and also manually, but with the same results both times .the only thing that has altered [as far as I know] is I have, after seeing it so highly recommended in another thread installed Spybot and AdAware, I'm also running, McAfie, Mailwasher and xp firewall at the moment, could it be a problem running spybot and all the other anti virus programs etc. that is causing my defrag problems ,all the other scans,disc clean,etc.that I have set to start on "Startup" seem to work ok, my operating system is ,of course XP, please no advice to change to a Mac.etc. as I've only just managed to get the hang of this one[I think] See MICK your not the only dumb old sod, there's alot of us about!!!

THANKS FOLKS!!
A very confused but not the wiser :- oldie

Posted on: 05 April 2004 by Minky

Oldie,

Have you tried running defrag in safe mode ?

Posted on: 06 April 2004 by oldie

Minky,
sorry to show my total ignorance, but I have no idea what safe mode is, or how to run it.As everything else on the computer seems to be alright,I'm completely confused so any help would be appreciated.
thanks, oldie.

Posted on: 06 April 2004 by David Stewart

Safe Mode is a sort of bare-bones windoze configuration normally used for trouble-shooting. It only loads a minimum number of essential drivers and no programs. It can therefore prevent other programs, normally loaded at startup time, from interacting with whatever you're trying to do, in this case running Defrag!

I'm not an XPert (still using Win98SE) but your help files should tell you how to restart the PC in safe mode. Otherwise just try disabling all other program applets that might be running and interfering with Defrag. Does theinitial Dialog box come up on screen OK??

David

Posted on: 06 April 2004 by oldie

Thanks Minky & David,
Due to your prompting and suggestions as to what may be a fault [ basiclly Me I think]I have just contacted my local friendly [FREE]computer support group and have been talked through the way to start the defragment program without going into the task schedule, now done!, the fault was apparently "ME" as the machine had decided that it didn't need a defragment run doing.A tutorial for idiots on how to access the "Safe mode" and all that includes is to follow shortly.
So once again Thanks for the help and steering me in the right direction!
oldie

Posted on: 06 April 2004 by David Stewart

Bloody Computers Eh?

What did we do before we had them to waste our time for us??

David