Unable to Defrag

[helplesstoo]

Daughter has WinXP Home on a 3 year old Acer laptop, has never done a defrag. Now unable to Defrag. It appears to start Analyzing but stops immediately at 10%, or it starts Defrag but stops immediately at 1%. Will not work in Safe Mode either even when using built in Administrator account. Have performed a Check Disk in regular mode and then later in Safe Mode, but during that scan it crashed, twice. Tried turning off System Hibernation and Firewall. Tried disabling all start up programs and then restarting. Still will not work. Has anyone heard of the free program Defraggler by ccleaner? Saw it mentioned on another forum. I'm wondering if that's safe to try.

[noknojon]

Hi helplesstoo -

It is a good program - I use it for a similar reason - My Windows Defrag pauses for a long time at about 5% so I chose Defraggler as an option -

It runs smoothly and Defrags quite well - After use check your Windows Defrag screen and you will find it looks good -

My problems (and reason for Defraggler was a missing/corrupted Windows dfrgres file) so I used Defraggler and stayed with it -

Thank You -

EDIT - As per YoKenny1 - You do need a certain amount ot free space first (from memory about 3-5% free) or you will have problems with Windows Defrag -

He has given good ways to free up a bit more space and this will help if the drive is over loaded -

[YoKenny1]

How much free space on the hard drive?

Try clearing some of the System Restore points by going to My Computer then right click on the C: drive then go to Properties then Disk Cleanup then select all items in Files to delete then click OK then click on More Options then Clean up... in System Restore

Defaggler is a good program that it is from Piriform the maker of CCleaner.

Make sure she has XP Service Pack 3 with all its updates.

Adding a bit more RAM will help speed the system up as well.

[helplesstoo]

Thanks for the help. It works now! As you said though, it took a long time, actually 24 hours to defrag one drive as it is overloaded. I did all the suggestions except I was hesitant to delete the System Restore points, hence the 24 hours but still the Defraggler program did its job when there seemed to be no other solution.

Thanks a lot.

[DarkSnakeKobra]

Defraggler does very well. I use it myself. I would recommend anything from piriform.

[yardbird]

I use the Defraggler also... You can use/try Diskeeper (for 30 days) I use Diskeeper on my new pc that has XP, 3gb of ram & a 250HD... I set the virtual memory 1.5-2 times higher than my ram. So in order to defrag the pagefile.sys & MFT.... I defrag in boot time. Or else in time the pagefile starts to frag. Then the pc starts to run a little slower.

[Blaze]

I'm also using Defraggler, another one I like is from Auslogics, download can be found here:

http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/download/

[noknojon]

I'm also using Defraggler

I find it like the old Win 98 defrag - Also quite quick , but I run it at least once a week - Seems a bit better than Auslogics (but only MY view ) -

I set the virtual memory 1.5 times higher than my ram.

I thought I was one of the few that did this - It actually helps -

[yardbird]

I find it like the old Win 98 defrag - Also quite quick , but I run it at least once a week - Seems a bit better than Auslogics (but only MY view ) -

I thought I was one of the few that did this - It actually helps -

@noknojon

theres quite a few that leave it alone, and quite a bunch that address the issue. and bump it up.. To my surprise, I saw my MS & Defraggler analyze stop at 37% after I changed the settings! My pagefile was fragged bad... Diskeeper fixed that! Brought it down to 1 fragment.

Anyone can type in google: "Why doesn't my defragmenter work on my pagefile?" and do some reading.. but don't turn off the pagefile when its in use! as you know.

Anyway I hope the original poster posts back with his results on that acer? later..