I cant run scandisk on windows me. it keeps looping and restarting until i get a message that its restarted 15 times and cant run. ive turned off all i can find thats running in the background but still no go. I know i have some partition problems too but cant fixthem. so because scandisk wont run i tried to defrag but defrag wont work and it tells me to run scandisk. Help!!!

i think there is a lot of startup items loaded in ur pc alot of open items beside the clock exit all this items or click start run and then type msconfig and remove the mark beside load startup items and then restart ur computer and scandisk will run with out any proplems i hope to be helpful

Probably a stupid question but did you remember to turn your screen saver off?

Hi Kevin The fastest and easiest way to run scandisk and defrag is to first boot your PC into safe mode. This will start the PC without all the bells and whistles, drivers and extras. Just start scandisk the way you normally would and when it finishes do the same with defrag. On my PC to get into safe mode I just keep pressing the F8 key once the machine starts to boot. That puts me into the boot menu. I believe safe mode is option 3. Good luck! HTH

Defrag sucks, if for no other rason than it takes so long. However, most compaints I've seen have been about defrag restarting over and over, because the swap file is "dynamic." If you set your swap file to a FIXED size, (equal to somewhere between one and two times the size of your memory) you should never have a problem. I have 256K ram and a 256K swap file, and I've never had a problem. But I use Norton's speed disk. Ideally, the (fixed) swap file should be at the beginning of the hard drive. You can download Norton's (or MacAfee's) utilities for a free demo, and after using their defragmenter once, it puts the swap file at the beginning of the disc. Then you can go back to using Defrag if you like. Maybe booting into safe mode works, but it should work without having to do that.

after i did set min and max size of swap file to 300 meg and moved it to D partition, defrag takes 5 minutes on C and D does not get fragmented at all... before it was taking hours... i am not using any utilities because had very bad experience with macafes on my windows 98 computer. Regards Miro

Good info, Miro. But not everybody wants partitions, or to have to buy partitioning software. BTW, what partitioning software did you use? Anyway, we both agree that setting the min and max size of the swap file to the same value goes a long way toward solving the defrag restart. I still don't like Defrag. Norton isn't that great, except that I do like Speed Disk. I just ordered Ontrack System Suite 3, based on PC World's review in the August issue. It has a defragmenter.