I have had an on-going problem with Defragmenting my hard drive. I have had difficulties for a number of months. I can defrag a floppy disk as normal but when I start the defrag on the C: drive it will start normally, then stops at about 3%, restarts and runs to 3 or so % and stops again. This repeats up until the 10th time then a message appears “Something is writing to disk / shut down programs and retry”. I have turned off screen savers, disabled virus scanners, checked for compression programs running. I feel I have tried all I can and need some help. Can you tell me what else I need to do to get the system to Defragment this drive and check for Errors? My system is running slow and I feel the defragmentation may assist. I have also off loaded a large number of JPG files I have scanned to floppy. Hoping you can help me

You have already deduced the reason that you cannot defragment your C: drive is because something is writing to it and the defragment utility needs to have absolute access to the drive. This is because in defragmenting, it is scanning and organising the drive and can’t do this while new data is being written to it. Although you may have thought that you have closed all programs on your computer there are probably a lot still running in the background. Make sure that all programs in the system tray are shut (except ones that you can’t close eg. Volume Control, Clock, etc…). Press CTRL-ALT-DEL and shutdown any other running applications from there (except vital ones eg. Explorer - which is the Windows GUI, Systray - which is the System Tray, etc…). Once you have done this, try to run Disk Defragmenter again. If you still have problems it may be a good idea to boot up your computer in ‘Safe mode’ and run it from there. Safe mode is a special diagnostic mode of Windows which loads only essential drivers and devices to run Windows (eg. CD-ROM drivers won’t be loaded, you will only see Windows in 16 colours and 640 x 480 resolution, no printer, network access, etc…). Although this mode looks very strange don’t worry, once you reboot your computer again it will return to normal. This mode is good because it doesn’t load any unnecessary programs so essentially Windows will be the only thing running. You can get into this mode by pressing the ‘F8′ or ‘CTRL’ key during boot up when the ‘Windows 9x starting’ message is displayed. Then a boot menu will appear and off that select ‘Safe mode’ followed by the enter key (NB: It may take Windows longer to boot in this mode). Once Windows has loaded run Disk Defragmenter and it should run ok. Now, to get your computer back to normal simply reboot and the computer should load up as per usual.