Defragmenting.....

danyosan

Can anyone tell me how to defrag windows xp. Anytime I try it just keeps restarting because theres obviously a program running in the background somewhere. I've tried closing all the programs on the toolbar but to no avail. On 98 it was easy, you just went into task manager and closed all the programs but in xp the real program names arent used so i dont know what processes I'm stopping. The amount of times ive ended up restarting the pc by doing this is unreal. There must be an easy way of doing this. Help please!!

My pc is running slow as s*** so I really need this done.

Thanks in advance

leeroybrown

You could try doing it from Safe Mode.

Orion

Safe mode would do it but I don't like using safe mode personally. You need to close anything you have running in the system tray (except AV). Then do a full Spyware scan (I use spybot myself). Then kill off your AV (after disconnecting from the internet). Then try it.

danyosan

excuse the ignorance, but how do i get into safe mode?

aidan_walsh

danyosan wrote:

excuse the ignorance, but how do i get into safe mode?

Excused.

Sid71

Keep pressing f8 as pc is booting up. You will then get a choice of modes
just choose Safe Mode! and your away!

Duffman

Isn't DMA disabled in safe mode?

That would make defragging painfully, painfully slow

garthv

Type msconfig into the run bar. Go down to the startup tab and disable any program from starting up. Then check task manager to see what running and stop them too. Then run your Defrag

vibe666

GaRtH_V wrote:

Type msconfig into the run bar. Go down to the startup tab and disable any program from starting up.

Then reboot!
no point unticking everything in msconfig without rebooting, cos it's stopping things at startup.

Then check task manager to see what running and stop them too. Then run your Defrag

Fionn

GaRtH_V wrote:

Type msconfig into the run bar. Go down to the startup tab and disable any program from starting up. Then check task manager to see what running and stop them too. Then run your Defrag

that could be risky! remember the computer needs to be re-started after this.
seeing that the user wasn't sure of Safe Mode, it's possible he might make things worse to go adjusting startup settings in MSconfig

perhaps you could try this first:
1. disconnect PC from the network or the internet
2. disable the screen saver
3. turn off power management
in the Control Panel go to power options and changethe options "Turn off monitor" & "Turn off hard disks" to Never
4. run disk cleanup
Click Start, select Programs, then accessories, and select System Tools click Disk Cleanup
5. run scandisk - if there's a prob defrag won't run
double click My Computer
highlight the C:\ drive right click it
select properties
click the tools tab and click check now to check the drive for errors.
the computer will need to restart to carry out the scandisk

6. turn off all non essential processes (incl AV, firewall etc.)

the easiest way to turn off background tasks is bring up the task manager theres a few ways of doing this press Ctrl Alt Delete; or go to Start select run and type in taskmgr and press ok
the task manager screen will appear and then you can see on the processes tab whats running in the background.
Obviously there's some processess that are essential the URL below gives a good list of them

http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm

or just d/l this
http://safsquad.com/Files/EndItAll2.zip

7. run scandisk

Note!
Some people advise that the pagefile should be also defragged!
this can be done manually too
however there's a free piece of software that can do it available here
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/PageDefrag.html

remember to turn on all the stuff you turned off

good luck!!!