Okay...'nother problem on my machine. Every time I try and either hit "analyze" or "defrag" in the defrag program, its telling me that it can't start the defrag program. It worked fine not 4 months ago.

I already looked through my processes list in the task manager, and through my add/remove programs list. Nothing stood out. I've never ecountered this before. The only thing I installed lately (or downloaded) was "Shattered Galaxy" (www.shatteredgalaxy.com). And I installed it. Anyway, ideas are welcome, I'll come back and check on this in the morning.

 

Same thing happened to me about a month ago, Was forced to actually 'update' my computer. Fixed the problem. Hope it works.

 

use an external defrag program. the included one in windows xp or vista are horrible.

 

Oh. Alright. Thanks. I happen to have one on a cd.

 

Perfectdisk has always worked really well for me, but these days I reinstall so often I've formatted before any fragmentation happens :/

 

reformat regularly is the best way to keep a pc in good order. Why do you think corporate business has s ghost partition on every workstation, central storage for personel files. They reload the ghost which has all the needed programs etc already installed pretty much creating a fresh install in around 20 minutes maybe less nowdays. They will do this maybe once a week/month depending on how big the workstation inventory is and how many specialized programs they have. This allows a LOT of user created problems to be easily fixed with a 15 minute fix.

Also, DO NOT defrag SSD drives. They do not fragment in the way normal hard disks do.

Also, defrag once a week if you can.

 

Too true.

Get yourself Selfimage and backup your install to a hard drive or DVD after you wipe it clean and have everything configured. Use Norton Ghost to put everything back when you fuck it up.