I am writing in regard to your response to a question on the 15 January 2001 concerning disk defragmentation. I am having the same problem of Disk Defragmenter always restarting and never completing. Can the solutions you provided for WindowsMe be used for Windows 98 or do they need amending? Last time I tried to defragment, it got as high as 53% and took over 24 hrs. However, then it lapsed and went back to 10%. Seemed to get into a loop. My configuration is a Celeron 333, 64mb RAM, 3gb hard drive running Windows 98. As suggested in the past from our computer shop, we closed all non-essential software and disabled the screen saver. They also mentioned something about power management. Can you help please?

The solutions I gave on the 15th January can be applied to Windows 98, however, some of these suggestions you would have already covered (such as closing all non-essential applications) as mentioned by your computer shop. I still think that your best bet is to boot your computer up in Safe Mode and run the defragment when in that mode. This is good as all non-essential applications and drivers don’t load which means the defragmentation process should be (almost) uninterrupted. You can boot the computer up in Safe Mode by pressing the ‘F8′ key when the ‘Windows 98 is starting…’ message is displayed (just before the Windows splash screen appears) and from the menu which appears, select and enter ‘Safe Mode’. However, if you do still wish to run the defragment through normal Windows, you must make sure that all non-essential applications and utilities are closed because if any application writes to the hard drive during either a defragment or scan disk then either utility will restart over again. This means closing other things as well, such as screen savers, antivirus programs, etc… In regard to power management, you should also make sure that this is disabled when running either Disk Defragmenter or ScanDisk. You should be able to do this by going to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Settings’ > ‘Control Panel’ and opening the ‘Power Options’ or ‘Power Management’ control panel. In the window which appears, make sure that you set all of the options so that no devices are turned off after a period of time (eg. make sure that ‘Turn off hard disks’ is set to ‘Never’). One of the foregoing methods should allow you to complete a disk defragment and a ScanDisk.