As per Jimmy, any other running prog. (such as SetiCrunch) may write to disc, 
and then defrag starts all over again. Give up on the idea of doing anything with 
your computer during the half-hour and more to follow. Clobber all but Systray and 
Explorer via repeated three-fingered salutes: Ctrl+Alt+Del, select a name in the 
window and then choose "End Task" ("Shut Down" will stop your computer: don't miss) 
until only systray and explorer remain. Then activate Defrag, though you can activate 
defrag first, and while it is checking stuff, start on the slaughter. Don't clobber 
defrag! A prog. such as TaskInfo2002 will reveal all running progs and allows you 
to stop them too, with less keyboard action. Even so, I still note the occasional 
restarting of defrag. But only occasional.
   You don't need to do a scandisc first, as defrag does a check itself, as more 
of your patience bleeds away.
   Because of memory leaks, the longer windows has been running since the last start, 
the more "lost" memory will be lying around, and this will be reflected in "unmoveable" 
areas of disc storage that are holding that lost memory as virtual memory on disc. 
Such pieces will prevent unused disc space from being amalgamated into one area, 
and on the next restart, they will have become unused disc space, also scattered 
about. If you can turn virtual memory off (if you have say at least 32MB real memory) 
then after a restart, these areas will become deleted file space and the defrag can 
do better. If you can't turn VM off (because your system won't run!), activate the 
option to specify your own settings, and choose a middling amount (say 50MB), restart 
and defrag. Presuming that your disc had 50MB spare space! The full amount will be 
allocated, and will stay allocated, rather than chunks being grabbed and freed in 
whatever parts of the disc are convenient as progs. start, run, and stop.
   After the defrag, revert to windows doing the choosing, restart, and defrag again. 
(Sigh) In this state, disc space is allocated for VM only as needed in the amounts 
needed (so don't activate any large progs such as wurd) and start the defrag as soon 
as the startup completes (preferably without many auto-started progs) so that there 
will be the minimum of lost memory scattered about.
   In other words, the thorough approach requires two defrags, the second immediately 
after a restart.
   W98 has an option in Defrag to "rearrange files so my progs. start faster"- this 
certainly means that defrag takes longer, and I'm not sure that it actually speeds 
starting.
  Much patience needed.





On Saturday, March 9, 2002 at 3:40 am, Jimmy wrote:
>In windows 98 I always close all programs running except explorer and systray. Then 
>I go to system properties and disable virtual memory. Then run scan disk first and 
>defrag last. This works good for me.  

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