Defragmenting

[Politically Incorrect]

When you defrag you need alot of free space. Your basically taking a bunch of files and putting them "off to the side" until thier proper place is opened for them to be placed into.
And if you don't have enough space in the HD for the files to swap back and forth then it will go into memory .

Also as with FS9 make sure you have no unneeded back ground processes running while defraging, as mentioned above you'll need as much free resources available.

Take Gixers advice and remove any unneeded stuff and then give it a shot.
Might also want to run a "scandsk" or "chkdsk" if your system has that.

[Jared]

I still say the defrag program built into windows 98 trumps the one they have in XP, and no not performance wise...

entertainment wise...

I mean how many of us defraggged a win98 system and watched the files move one bit at a time?

I know I did! :-)

[Saitek]

Yeah I agree! lol

[eno]

I still say the defrag program built into windows 98 trumps the one they have in XP, and no not performance wise...

entertainment wise...

I mean how many of us defraggged a win98 system and watched the files move one bit at a time?

I know I did! :-)

And then it stopped as soon as anything wrote to the disc  ergo your screensaver.

[4_Series_Scania]

Windows built in Defragmenter is pretty bog standard. (Read crap!)

Some good and much faster alternatives include Vopt XP and Diskeeper, try those for a good quality defrag. Before defragging it is always a good idea to delete all temporary files, temp internet files, empty your recycle bin (all in system tools > disk cleanup). There

[Politically Incorrect]

What if any  benefit  is there defragging in Safe Mode?

[4_Series_Scania]

What if any  benefit  is there defragging in Safe Mode?

Nothing running in the background to screw it up, like screensaver, anti-virus etc etc etc.

A systems analyst told me to do it when I found my defragger constantly re-started after getting to approx 30%, and I did'nt know what was the culprit, tried in Safe mode and it ran through without a glitch, hence my choice.  ;)

[Skittles]

According to M$ standards, Defragment at least 3 times.  I can't comment on the problems you guys are having, but I'll tell you what I have and do.

My MAIN drive has three partitions. The first, contains the Windows installation. The second partition contains the swap file and other stuff. The third partition contains the Temporary Internet files.

My GAMES drive has two patrtitions. The first contains FS2004 only. The second is all the other games.

I only defrag every 6 months or as I add something for FS2004.  FS2004 doesn't do much "writing" so there is very, very little change.   And, most of the writing it does do, it's to the FS9.cfg which is in the profileon the other drive.  My swap file is set to stay at 1536MB so defragging is not required here.

Joe

[Gunny04]

I have an auto defrag for every 12 hours or so and if things get messy such as emptying my bank account on Payware, well then I manual defrag, I use Diskeeper works great for me  ;D I also do all the other stuff too such as virus scan, Spyware..... etc! thats another story, and my drive doesnt look as bad as some! Cheers, Gunny