Stroller wrote:
On 15/11/2010, at 3:56am, Dale wrote:
...
I have a niece that brought me her puter. It's a HP with windoze XP on it. I
want to defrag the hard drive but the one that comes with windoze won't work.
Is there a free defrag tool that is safe on windoze?
I would be more concerned why defrag itself (Start> Run `dfrg.msc`) isn't
working. If it's refusing because there's filesystem corruption, then I would
advise against using anything else!
You need to be logged in as an administrator in order to run defrag. If you
boot XP to safe mode then a user named Administrator will be shown amongst the
logon icons, and that user has no password.
Running defrag,exe at the command-line (Start> Run `cmd`; `defrag,exe /?`)
might give an explanation. Running `chkdsk /?`, choosing the most aggressive
options and then `chkdsk c:` will cause the disk to be checked for corruption
(`fsck` equivalent) at the next reboot. Obviously you should take a backup before
doing this, as occasionally filesystem corruption will be *really* bad.
Ideally you will disable swap / pagefile before defragmenting and enable it
again afterwards. You can boot from a PE boot CD and run defrag from that, but
it doesn't really seem necessary.
Also check that "compress files and folders" is disabled<http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307987>. You're best
to apply it to the whole drive (actually tick the box saying you DO want to compress files and folders), but when the dialog
box comes up saying "shall I apply that to all sub-directories" tell it "no". Then go back to checkbox
again, disable it, then when the dialog box comes up tell it "yes". That will crunch away for some time ensuring
that compression is not being used at all. Because Windows XP launched a decade ago, when disks were much smaller, the option
to compress files and folders is recommended in the Disk Cleanup Wizard, so this option may be set incorrectly, and it is
worth checking.
Stroller.
I am thinking like you on the reason it is not working. It was brought
to me because it was not running as fast as it used to. First thing I
noticed was that AVG hasn't been updated in about 2 YEARS. I installed
the newest AVG and it found hundreds of infections and said it fixed
them. I never was a big believer in "fixing" a infection. Anyway, I
got that updated and got it to scan until nothing was found.
While doing that, I noticed the drive was really doing some serious
searching while booting and such. It is also pretty slow to boot. The
poor drive light stays on about all the time and you can hear the heads
going back and forth. I wanted to run defrag just to see if it would
help. I figure if AVG hasn't been updated in that long, I doubt they
ran defrag either, not to mention it doesn't work.
I couldn't get Defraggler to work either. Different error and I even
tried a older version that wasn't beta with the same results. I then
found mydefrag and gave it a try. So far, it is working on it and it
seems to be doing something at least. The window makes it look like it
was fragmented really bad. It looks like something that would come out
of a blender after hitting frappé.
If this completes, I'm going to let them try it to see if it is any
better. If it is still not to their liking, they will just have to get
a windoze CD and I'll reinstall from scratch. That should help.
In case you can't tell, I don't claim to know a lot about windoze.
People in my family just like me to work on their puters. I worked on
puters until windoze 3.1 came out. I changed careers. I got tired of
that pretty quick. I just thought DOS was bad. lol
Dale
:-) :-)
