My main home PC (running Win98 SE) has been having problems for a couple of months now, freezing up for no apparent reason. Sometimes quick, sometimes not. I've been figuring it's time for a Windows reinstall, so today, while cleaning the basement, I decided to kick it off. I wouldn't have to check back but every so often, and I wouldn't have to use any of my prime gaming time for PC maintenance.

So I kick off a reinstall... and 45 minutes later, the system is hung with a red "X" box. Restart, and it puts the registry back the way it found it. Hmmm... I thought that's what I was trying to fix...

Take another look, and my C: drive is 95% full! A 20GB drive, and I've got less than 45MB free! No idea where it's all gone to, but I moved one large data directory to another drive and freed up 5GB of space. Finishing up a defrag, and I should find out within the next couple of days whether it was just a space problem... :thumbtwiddle:

Side question: other folks, like Willow, have mentioned preferred defrag alternatives. I'm going to look through the archives, but if anyone has one of those at the tip of their tongues, please feel free to pass it along.

Ah, the life of the guy who supposedly knows something about computers... :D

Sounds like you need to delate all those *cough* intresting [img]graemlins/heee.gif[/img] pictures you downloaded from the net to make space! ;)

roflmao...maybe they were downloaded as an experiment? or maybe he had to wirte an essay about them [img]graemlins/hehe.gif[/img] [img]tongue.gif[/img]

Just looking only at the title of your thread, my first thoughts were "Yes, plants DO NEED WATER ;) "

LOL! Me too! Never knew I was such a tree-hugging hippie :D

I take it you don't have Norton Speeddisk? That's pretty good. Otherwise try Diskeeper, you can get a 30 day free trial on that one. I've heard some nice things about Powerdefrag as well but I have never tried it myself. But anything is better than Win98's defrag utility. ;)

The Norton Utilities are great, especially for one button checks of the system, finding registry errors (and correcting them) and getting rid of temp files you never realized were there. I think the one time I used them to defrag instead of the usual XP defrag,it went a little faster, too.

Interesting pictures? Really, Wellard, just what are you thinking of? [img]tongue.gif[/img]

And Stormy, that was Pete Townshend's excuse.

As for plants, I haven't killed any recently (unless it was on purpose).

Willow, thanks for the links. I'm awaiting a download of Diskkeeper at the moment... nope, still not here.

We'll see if the machine stays up today. Time will tell... [img]smile.gif[/img]

If you use Norton SpeedDisk, then don't use Windows degrag. Or at least that's what Norton's SystemWorks 2002 manual said.

I have new CPU and have to buy the durned thing again.

That's what I have, Timber. It is a lot faster, and with two hard drives I don't want to sit and wait for XP to do it!