Windows 98 users and others: Review the alternate solution if your defragmenter  starts and restarts again and again.

No really, reorganizing your sock or sweater drawer, the kitchen or the garage tool bin is a necessary task. The benefits of doing this regularly should be obvious. You can find all your socks, tools, and kitchen gadgets quickly and efficiently. Dressing is quicker, fixing dinner is quicker and finishing that long awaited house repair project is easier when all your tools are in one place.

Your computer’s hard drive works the same way. Your hard drive stores all of the programs and data necessary to keep your computer running. But over time the hard drive becomes messy. Part of programs here, pieces of data there. You’ve got toys strewn all over the house; you have tools all over the garage, or pots and pans and utensils all over the kitchen.

Fragmentation is a normal occurrence on all systems and is not cause for concern that your system is misbehaving. Overall performance will be improved by running the disk defragment utility on a regular basis. Collecting pieces or parts of a program and assembling them for use is time consuming and makes your system work harder. You can make Thanksgiving dinner quicker if your kitchen utensils are organized; all in one place clean and ready to go. Similarly your hard drive could load start entire program in one giant gulp if all the pieces were physically located in together.

To run disk defragmentation utility:

• Exit and close all programs

• Shut down and disable all screen savers

• Start

• Programs

• Accessories

• System Tools

• Disk Defragmenter

• Select the drive you wish to defragment  (Drive letter C is the main hard drive on most systems)

• Click Defragment

A regular defragmentation process will improve overall performance, especially after emptying the recycle bin, deleting temporary files and clearing the Internet disk cache. If these three techniques cleared lots of space, then the defragmentation is the natural next step in your system tune-up.

Additional Notes and comments:

If your screen saver is set to activate at a short time interval (less than 20 minutes), it will slow down the speed of your defragmentation utility. Disable the screen saver until the defrag is complete.

Windows 98 users and others: Review the alternate solution if your defragmenter  starts and restarts again and again.

If your disk defragmenter seems to start over and over and you get the message, "drive contents changed, restarting" you probably have some program or utility still active in Windows. You might not  always see these  programs, nor even know which  ones are active. It’s probably one or more utility programs and schedulers.

Technical Papers on Disk Fragmentation can be found at:

Maintaining Windows 2000 Peak Performance Through Defragmentation

Using Disk Defragmenter in Windows XP

Disk Fragmenation Information