Hi folks,

I was trying to defrag my girlfreinds pc, and it would not do it. It kept saying that something was tring to write to the hard drive. I put the computer into safemode and tried their. It worked, but slowly. Now the PC is working very slowly and I'm in trouble!! Help, what have I done???

It's ME
64 MB RAM
19GB HDD

did you turn off the screen saver? mine dont like defragging and stuff like that if the screen saver is set.

I've never in my life seen a successful defrag in ME. One of it's many bugs I think.

I'd suggest grabbing an alternative defragger like Diskeeper. Look for Diskeeper Lite... it was a special freeware version that they stopped distributing, but you can still legally use it (I *believe*) and some sites still have it. Needs a bit of work with Google.

Another good one is Norton Speed Disk by Symantec. It's commercial, they used to sell it separately but I think it's only available as part of Norton Utilities or Systemworks now.

get this programme called 'power defrag' on free trial it does it all for you, switching off screensavers and making sure everything goes smoothly

www.powerdefrag.com

Thanks, I will give it a go...

Switch off Anti Virus ?

If you've got office installed go to control panel and disable Fast Find, turn off screensaver and disable anti-virus program. If it still does it then it might be easiest just to start the computer in safe mode, run scandisk and defrag and then shutdown/restart.

If you want to try doing a proper job of it you can try typing msconfig in the run box and then go to the startup editor and look for programs listed there, after that if you recognise something you don't need then take a tick out of the box (you can always turn it back on later), then restart the machine and try defragging again. Failing that you can then go to SysInternals website and download a program called Filemon - this will show what programs are accessing the hard drive so you can run that beforehand and track down the thing which is interupting it - because as you know if some other program trys to access the disk then either scandisk or defrag will keep restarting and it takes forever.

If you don't understand what you are disabling then it might be better just to leave it how it is, it should defrag ok in safe mode although it will (usually) be a lot slower.