Question about my Mother's Laptop

[Denholm]

Hello there,

I will occasionally open up my Mother's laptop to run periodical AV, AS, and AR scans on her system. Along with that I'll use CCleaner to clean up temporary files and I'll use the defragmenter to analyze her disk for fragments. Unfortunately, the defragmenter won't respond when I press Analyze or Defragment. I've tried the command lines as well, and they report that they can't reach the defragmenting service. So, no big deal. I check Microsoft's website for some tips on resolving the issue. I found a very decent tip that mentions to go into C:\Windows\INF\, right-click the dfrg.ini file, and then click install.

After doing this I attempted to use the Windows Application and command lines for Defrag.exe. Both still couldn't locate or use the defragmenting service! So I'm wondering, what can I do to repair or re-install the defragmenting service?

My Mother's computer is an XP Home SP2 running on a 1.44 GHZ Processor. If you need a DxDiag, I'll start it up and fetch one for you.

[BaldEagl]

Try shutting down any security software (anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall, etc.) then see if it works.  I have to do that to defrag on both my older machines.

[Denholm]

I'll do that.

The only service that would have interfered never prevented a defrag on our other XP, though.

[Nwbie]

see if you can get to it in safe mode

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Just make sure you don't waste too much time on it if it won't work. Defrag really does little in normal computer use. It may speed up application start a little but has no effect on the way they run providing you have enough ram to run the applications.

If you don't have the ram (making the laptop swap) no amount of defrag will make it run good - off to ram shop it is.

[Denholm]

Its not a RAM issue. I just run the defrag occasionally because one of my computers almost died because of fragmented files. (Odd, I know.)

Anyways, I tried what you mentioned BaldEagl, didn't work. First I disabled the AV, then I tried to defrag, still won't do anything. So I went back to C:\Windows\INF\, right-clicked dfrg.inf, and pressed Install. Afterward I tried to defrag again and it still didn't do anything.

I'll try safe mode later today, see if anything different happens.

[Denholm]

Well, same results in safe mode.

Here's the DxDiag: http://603sqdrn.collectivelyspaced.com/DxDiag.txt

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Get Auslogics defrag its faster and better than the XP native one. I still think that if a machine gets so fragmented it becomes a problem there's something somewhere else wrong, usually too small amount of ram which makes the OS trash the swapfile constantly.

One good trick is to manually set the virtual memory size. That way the OS won't constantly be resizing it and that reduces fragmentation a lot.

[Denholm]

That works!



Thank you.