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Maintenance Routines ? (1 Viewer)

John Watson

Screenwriter
Joined
Jul 14, 2002
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Maintenance Routines. Couple of things :

1. Does anyone ever do Thorough Disk Scan? It takes so friggin' long!

I was recently told by computer after an attempt to Defrag was halted (some message said the drive was changed in the process) that I might want to run a Thorough Disk Scan for errors.

The message did NOT advise me to choose the Correct Errors option on the Thorough Scan, but after I had started it, and realised that at the rate it was scanning all the clusters, this would go on for many, many, many hours, it occurred to me that I would have been mighty po'd to be told at the end, that I would have to run it again to correct any errors.

Perhaps it would just flag those errors, so it could go directly to them to make corrections, but I've no idea. Anyone know?

Anyway, I halted the Thorough Scan after 20 minutes, then rebooted the computer, and ran Defrag again, and this time successfully. So I have no idea if there are any "errors" (whatever they are) on the disk, and am left with the nagging fear that many computer dialog boxes are as helpful as ill-educated monkeys.

2. Defragging. Defragging often restarts itself, ie, chugs along for 10 minutes, says its at 72% or something, then seems to stop and go directly back to 0. Fortunately, once it reaches 10% again, it seems to speed-scan thru to where it stopped, and continue from this point.

What's going on? Why can the Defrag software not over-ride any other processes that may interfere with it?

If I wanted to stop at 72% (for example) would my computer be less fragmented and more stable than when I started the process, or does it have to be 100% defragmented for the process to be of any value?
 

Chris

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Jul 4, 1997
Messages
6,788

What OS? If 98/98SE and you have a drive of any size, using the internal defragger is a total waste of time. It will restart often and doesn't do much of anything. Realize, their inbuilt defragger is liscenced from Symantec and is basically Norton Utilities 4.0 defrag, which is more then 5 generations old now ;)

You should try something like O&O Defrag (http://oo-software.com/) or Disk Keeper (http://www.execsoft.com/)
 

John Watson

Screenwriter
Joined
Jul 14, 2002
Messages
1,936
Wow! I had Norton Utilities once. Crashguard was one reason I stopped using it :D

But this particular computer I'm referring to uses Windows ME.
 

Diallo B

Screenwriter
Joined
Dec 18, 2002
Messages
1,085
in order to answer your question better we would need to know the OS in question.

1. i do a thorough disk scan once a week. but since i use xp its not that big a deal. my computer reboots and does the disk scan before the computer finishes booting. it takes maybe 15 min. from what you are saying you are probably using a win9x or ME OS.

2. i also do a defrag after i run a disk scan. once again its not that big a deal with xp.

my advice to you, given your probable OS, would be to run both processes in safe mode. these processes perform their actions much faster in safe mode. but still take a decent chunk of time to complete.
 

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