I want to do a defrag, but do I need to do a disc scan first? I ,of course am not sure, any advice on the subject would be helpful,thanks!

You do not need to do scandisk first. Unless the defrag program gives an error message.

It's not necessary but a prudent precaution.

Thanks jack and dark, the defrag went very well----but out of curiosity, what is a scan disk for? Newbie.

cc, the scan disk just checks your drive for errors. Errors can occur from particles inside the drive itself. If your hard drive heads run into a particle(dust or dirt)the heads will fling up and then slam into the hard drive platter usually leaving a little nick in the surfuce causing the hard drive not being able to write or read data. Errors can also be caused by an impact to the drive itself. Hard drives are not perfect and the data on a hard disk can sometimes just become corrupted. Scan disk can fix errors to keep your system running properly and if there is any surfuce errors that cant be repaired scan disk will mark the bad sectors of the hard drive so nothing will be written there so u dont run into problems.. Hope this helps