There are two problems with my PC which may be related. I am running Windows 98 SE on a Pentium III 550MHz with a 20Gb hard disk, 128Mb of RAM, and a SoundBlaster Live! Value sound card. The hard disk is partitioned into C, D and E drives with the C drive containing the operating system. The first problem is the message ‘Error: Could not install service vectors, press any key to continue’ appears on shutdown. The next message after pressing any key is ‘It is now safe to turn off the computer’ after which it automatically powers off. The second problem relates to defragmenting. Disk Defragment works fine on the D and E drives but sometimes doesn’t work on the C drive. Defragmenting of the C drive appears to work ok except sometimes when I apply the defragment a second time immediately after the first because the drive picture appears to be unchanged from the picture before the initial defragment. I would appreciate your help.

The cause of the first problem with the SoundBlaster Live! Value sound card is that there is not enough free Interrupt Requests (IRQs) on your computer to install SoundBlaster Emulation. IRQs are addresses where the computer can expect a device to send feedback regarding its operation. For example, when a scanner has completed its operation, it will send a signal to the computer. This will interrupt the computer briefly and then the computer can decide what processing it needs to do next. Each device must have its own IRQ as the computer may not be able to understand multiple signals on the one IRQ. Now you are probably wondering what is SoundBlaster Emulation. The SoundBlaster Live! card installs a driver to emulate the original SoundBlaster card in order to provide compatibility with older DOS applications. You are getting the error message as your computer cannot reserve an IRQ for the SoundBlaster emulation as there are none free. If you don’t have any old DOS applications which use sound, then you can uninstall SoundBlaster emulation to stop the error message appearing. To do this, go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Settings’ > ‘Control Panel’ and open the ‘System’ control panel and click the ‘Device Manager’ tab. Expand ‘Creative Miscellaneous Devices’ (by clicking the + next to it) and double click ‘Creative SB Live! SB16 Emulation’. In the ‘Creative SB Live! SB16 Emulation’ properties window that appears, place a tick in the checkbox for ‘Disable in this hardware profile’ near the bottom of the window. Click ‘Ok’ and in the device manager you should now see a red X on the icon next to ‘Creative SB Live! SB16 Emulation’ which indicates that this device has been disabled. You can close the ‘Device Manager’/'System Properties’ window. The error message should no longer occur.

The reason that your C drive may not been appear to be defragmented is because it isn’t that fragmented in the first place and thus disk defragmenter doesn’t need to rearrange the sectors (this may especially be true if you defragment often). A way to make sure that the disk is being defragmented is to click the ‘Show Details’ button which will show the visual representation of the defragmentation. From here you should be able to make sure that it is actually defragmenting.