Norton Utilities is installed on my home computer but unfortunately I cannot get Speed Disc to work. The particular problem is that Speed Disc constantly restarts after running for about 14 minutes. I have systematically shut down all other programs and utilities, done a clean reboot, used task manager to ensure nothing is running, etc’¦ all to no avail. The Windows defragmentation utility doesn’t work either. I am running Windows 98.

The reason that utilities such as Speed Disc and Disk Defragmenter restart is because some program is accessing the hard drive, changing the contents, and thus causing the defragmentation utility to have a fit as the disk contents are changing while the program is trying to rearrange the contents of the disk. One approach you may not have tried is booting the computer in Safe Mode and running the Disk Defragmenter. When running in Safe Mode, nothing is loaded except essential components to let Windows run. To try this, restart your computer and when the ‘Windows 98 Starting’¦’ message appears (just before the Windows splash screen) press F8 or CTRL. The Windows 98 Startup Menu will appear. From this menu, select ‘Safe Mode’. Once Windows has finished loading try running either Speed Disc or Disk Defragmenter. If this does not fix the problem, another possible solution can be found at www.techweb.com/winmag/fixes/defrag.htm. This has a downloadable registry fix which adds the Windows Disk Defragmenter to the RunOnceEx registry key. Even though this will only run the Windows Disk Defragmenter and not Norton Speed Disc, you could always edit the registry fix to run Speed Disc, once you are convinced that it will work with Disk Defragmenter. There are links to two Microsoft Knowledge Base articles at the bottom of the TechWeb article which you should read if you wish to put your own custom entries into the RunOnceEx registry key. In particular, anyone interested in using the RunOnceEx key for any purpose should read the article support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q232/5/09.asp as this contains information about the syntax used in the RunOnceEx key. As always, be careful when editing the registry as there can be unintended ill side-effects if edited incorrectly.