Is my computer ok

Posted by: Mick P on 29 March 2004

Chaps

My PC is on Broad band and everything works well and is fairly fast.

I always clear out cookies etc once a fortnight and defragment about once every 3 months.

I now notice that I cannot defrag. I go up to 10% and then can go no further. Also I have been giving my hard drive a "thorough" clean rather than standard and it is still at it 14 hours later.

Is this anything to worry about or have I got trouble looming up.

Many thanks

Mick
Posted on: 29 March 2004 by andy c
Mick,
Do you have a restore feature like 'go-back' running on your computer?
That would really slow down the de-frag time.
Also, do you shut down all other progs before de-fragging?
a spec for you machine would help...

andy c!
Posted on: 29 March 2004 by David Stewart
The Defrag progress bar is not very useful. The best way to run defrag is overnight (it took over 10 hours on mine last week) just start it, leave it and forget it. Also it will stall if there's any other programs trying to access your hard-drive whilst its running, so shut everything else down. The other thing that will cause problems is bad-blocks on the disc, if these havn't been mapped by Scandisk first. If you're having problems you should run a full surface scan prior to letting defrag loose on it!

David
Posted on: 29 March 2004 by seagull
quote:
My PC is on Broad band and everything works well and is fairly fast


Mick, how fragmented is your disk? I would have thought that every three months may be a little over the top unless you are in the habit of installing/de-installing loads of software and creating loads of datafiles and deleting them again.

If it aint broke don't fix it.
Posted on: 29 March 2004 by cunningplan
Mick
You say it stops on 10% of the defrag process. It sounds as if you have a small program running in the background which is interfering.I had a similar problem once with Win Amp doing exactly the same. What software have you recently installed that could well be the cause. Hope this helps

Regards
Clive
Posted on: 29 March 2004 by BigH47
Mick if you are using Win9x the defrag keeps re-setting after approx 10% because something has been written to the drive changing the data. If you leave it long enough it will eventually work its way through the whole drive. If you watch the progress on the pretty page you will see it gets abit furthe each time. Don't forget temp files ad- burrowers (try Ad_Aware a freebie) etc as well.
Regards
Howard
Posted on: 29 March 2004 by Mick P
I will reboot the PC and start again and defrag overnight. I will let you know how I get on.

Many thanks

Mick
Posted on: 29 March 2004 by Not For Me
One of my disk drives went a bit wonky, so I started a scandisk on a Sunday,it was still running the next Thursday, then disk completely failed.

Do you have any vital data (pics of the missus / dog / holiday?) if so BACK UP to another disk / CDR etc. before more grief.

DS

OTD - Tronic - Substance
Posted on: 29 March 2004 by Mick P
Just to let you know that the defrag took three and three quarters of an hour.

I take it that rebooting and then defragging in effect closes down all programmes.

Many thanks

Mick