I bought a Pentium III 700 with Windows 98 SE. Two features which I could use previously with my old computer with Windows 98 SE were lost. Firstly, the install new fonts feature. Windows Help says to go to the ‘Control Panel’, then ‘Fonts’. When I look in the ‘File’ menu there is no ‘Install Fonts’ as previously. I can copy the fonts across manually into the ‘Fonts’ folder but they don’t show up in Word 7. Secondly, I am unable to cut and paste some files. These files include documents which I created myself and applications which I downloaded from the internet. Also, I completely defragmented C drive. I then created a image of an Audio CD which took up some 700mb of hard disk space. After I copied the image file onto a CD I deleted the image file and defragmented again. I did this by using a registry entry as you advised in a previous column so that defragmenting occurs before anything else is loaded at bootup. My hard drive is 9 gb and after 6 hours the defragment was only 40% completed! My question is, with me moving huge chunks of hard drive space moving around with CD copying, when should I defragment? I know some people who defragment every day and I am wondering whether that will wear out their hard drive quicker?

Your first question about the loss of some features of Windows sounds like you have a bad installation of Windows. I suggest that you reinstall Windows. While this may be an inconvenient solution, it really is the quickest way to solve your problem. Otherwise it may take a very long time to track down the source of the problem and it may end up not even being fixable by any other way than a fresh install of Windows. Concerning the defragmenting problem, the time it takes to defragment a drive depends on the size of the drive, the free space on the drive, the number of files and folders on the drive, the extent of the fragmentation, and the amount of system resources available. The reason that your computer takes so long to defragment is because of the volume of large files you create and delete. Disks become especially fragmented when you delete large files or a large number of files and folders from a drive. For this reason, it is probably best for you to defragment your drive after you have deleted the large image file(s). Also, you can probably speed up defragmenting your drive as well by booting up in Safe Mode and running Disk Defragmenter from there. You can do this by pressing the F8 key when you see the ‘Windows 9x is starting…’ message during boot up and select ‘Safe Mode’ from the boot up menu. The people you know who can defragment their hard drive very fast are able to because they do not delete large files on a regular basis as you do. I suggest that you only defragment your drive after you have finished deleting a large batch of files for a large period of time (ie. if you delete a few image files and you don’t plan to delete any more for a few months). I wouldn’t suggest that you do it on a regular basis as it is very time consuming. And as mentioned in my response to the previous question, defragmenting shouldn’t have any adverse consequences for your computer as it is simply organising the data on your hard drive.