Re: OT: standalone defrag for W98 ?

["Martin J. Osborne" osborne@xxxxxxxx]

The Windows defrag program will work if you first close all programs
except Explorer and Systray (press Alt-Ctrl-Del and choose the programs
to end) and then run scandisk. (Probably you don't need to run scandisk
first, but these were the instructions I got from a piece in the New
York Times several years ago.)


J. R. Fox wrote:

> There are a number of places where I could inquire about this, but
> since many of you use W98, I thought 'Why not take a shot here ?' I
> was recently called upon to do some maintenance on my nephew's
> computer, which is running W98. One of the things it needed was a
> good defrag run -- or two. The built-in utility for this does not
> work: left to run for a couple hours, the process keeps bouncing
> between 0 % and 1 % complete, and that's as far as it gets. Anyone
> have a recommendation for a good, portable, standalone util. that can
> be run _from outside_, probably from an ERD bootup ? (That means
> Command Line, rather than GUI-based.) It should be appropriate for
> W98, with an emphasis on safety and reliability. (I recall the
> controversy over a past version or two of Norton SpeedDisk that
> fatally scrambled what it was supposed to be defragmenting.) I have
> used DiskKeeper on NT-4 and W2K (a "lite" version is the built-in
> defragger for W2K, though not so identified) with good results, but it
> has to be installed first and so is not external or portable.
>
> Jordan


--
Martin J. Osborne
Department of Economics
150 St. George Street
University of Toronto
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