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Thread: Beginners Guide to Defragging Win98

  1. #1
    Gray Haired Old Fart aeallison's Avatar
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    Beginners Guide to Defragging Win98

    Running Defrag is an important part of maintaining your computer system. When you install programs or save files to your computer your computer places these files onto your hard drive. The hard drive is your main storage device. A hard drive (or hard disk) is a mechanical device that consists of several metal disks housed inside a sealed metal box. Each metal disk has two read/write heads that move across the surface of each side of each disk. As your computer writes files on these disks, it places them in a specific order. As you use your computer it moves these files into your memory chips (RAM or Random Access Memory) when it no longer needs these files it will write them back to the hard drive to the first available “open space” it can find. After time, the files that were once in order on the disk are now mixed up and scattered (Fragmented). This will result in a “slow down” of your computer because now it has to work harder to find these files.

    You will first need to close all of the programs that are running in the “background”, To do this press, and hold, the “Ctrl” and “Alt” keys on your keyboard, then tap the “Delete” key (only tap it once, because two taps will shut down your computer) then release them. This will open up “Task Manager”, you will see a small window with various programs listed, these are the programs (or Processes) that are running in the background such as your Anti-Virus, schedulers, and such. All of these need to be turned off except for two of them (System Tray and Explorer). Now move your cursor over one of the files you want to turn off and click it to highlight it, Then click the “End Task” button at the bottom of this window. A new window may pop up to confirm your action, simply click the “End Task” button in this window to finish. You will have to go through this process for each of the processes listed.

    Be patient, and take your time, the worst that could happen is that your computer will shut down and you will have to start all over.

    To put these files back in order Windows provides you with a tool called Defrag. The easiest way to use this tool is by opening “My Computer” (an icon on your desktop) Move your mouse cursor over the icon that represents your hard drive (Usually marked as C: ) and click the right mouse button. This will pop up a small menu, look for the word “Properties” and click it with the left button. You will now see a window with a pie chart and a tab at the top marked “Tools” click the Tools tab and you will see three options, the first is Scan your computer for errors (Scandisk), the second is Backup your Hard Drive, and the third is Defragment your Hard Drive.

    You will need to scan your drive for errors first, so select the first “tool”. This will open a small window with a couple of options, the only one you need to select is “Automatically fix errors”.

    When this is done, select the third option to defragment your hard drive. A small window will pop up, just select the option to defragment. This might take some time depending on how large your hard drive is and how fragmented it may be, so just relax and let your computer do its thing, you will be rewarded by a faster running computer. Do this at least once a month, or if you use your computer a lot, or play games on it, run it weekly.
    I have a question; are you the bug, or the windshield?

  2. #2
    Senior Member Info Tech Geek's Avatar
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    It would have been great if you added a poll to this post asking how many people were still running Windows98. I am a bit curious to know...

  3. #3
    Gray Haired Old Fart aeallison's Avatar
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    I run a small dial-up ISP in the midwest, possibly 2/3s of my users are still running win98, I first did this tut in our January '04 newsletter and got rave reviews. Of course that is not saying much for the technologically retarded community I reside in. But, I searched all of the Tuts here and found nothing like it here. So I made my contribution. I agree it is not much, but it might come in handy to someone, someday.
    I have a question; are you the bug, or the windshield?

  4. #4
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    You are right about performance improvement by defragmenting. It is particularly useful for older machines with slower drives, procedssors, and not much memory. Typically these would still be running Win98. Like yourself my community still has a lot of people running Win98 or Me.

    The defragmentation that ships with Win98 is not very good............Me is much better. I don't think that you can d/l it from Microsoft anymore, but there is a tweaking tool called Xen" that used to replace defrag on Win 98 boxes.

    http://www.x9000.net/

    There are a number of other tools on the site as well.

    Cheers

  5. #5
    Senior Member Info Tech Geek's Avatar
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    Well. I guess there must be quite a few users if Microsoft is extending support until 2006.

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    I still run win98 and I'm quite happy with it..and I'll run it until billy boy takes my win98se cd from my dead cold hands.. (paraphrasing Charlton Heston's speach at the NRA)

    however, nihil is quite right.. the defrag that come with windows sucks.. you either have to run it in safe mode or make sure that all processes are shut down.. even then it still sucks.
    I'm a big fan of voptxp (formerly called voptme) but there's a few other defrag utils that are equally (or almost) as good as voptxp..

    (sorry aeallison.. just my 2 cents.. but not a bad tut overall..)

  7. #7
    I ran Win98se until later last year, and was really happy with it.

  8. #8
    Gray Haired Old Fart aeallison's Avatar
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    (sorry aeallison.. just my 2 cents.. but not a bad tut overall..)
    Whats to be sorry about? I did this for the beginners, I am glad that others are giving other suggestions. I had not opened that avenue, I left it for you all.
    I have a question; are you the bug, or the windshield?

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