Frequent defrag's

Howdy,
I am using a corporate machine running:
Win98 v4.10.2222A, Pentium Pro CPU, Award Bios v6.0, 64M ram, Western Digital 2 gig Caviar HD with 20% +/- free.
An old dog that will stay this way for the future.
My problem is that I have to dfragment the hard drive 4-5 times a day with normal use. Normal being e-mail, internet use, word processing, and image viewing and printing.
To defragment I use Executive Software Diskeeper v7.0.398; the fragmentation runs from 100 to 300 fragmented files per session. I have scanned the drive using the Western digital utility for this HD which reported no problems. I frequently run disk cleanup and have it set to run daily at system idle time.
I frequently scan for viruses with the corporate Trend OfficeScan and have Ad-aware, Spybot S&D, SpyBlaster and Hijack this installed and in use.
What causes a hard drive to fragment so quickly and what is the way to prevent it in the first place?

Thanks for your time and presence.
DP

 

The importance of when to defrag is how much of the drive is fragmented, not how many files.

Each any every file you use, especially under Fat or Fat32 is going to fragment to a degree.

 

you should also see what those fragemented are. I bet those fragmented files are temporary internet files. You shouldn't worry if those are fragmented or not.

As for reducing fragmentation, you need to uninstall a bunch of programs to make more free space on your hard disk. You don't need so many programs installed taking up precious hard disk space. The more free space you have the easier it is to create a large contiguous amount of free space. If you don't have a huge area of free space you download and install Raxco's Perfectdisk. Just use the trial version to create a large chunk of free space and then uninstall it when your done.

 

I wouldn't worry about 200-300 files becoming fragmented.
look at the overall percentage. It's normal for 200-300 files to become fragmented in a day,my C drive does it every day.
BTW perfectdisk doesn't run on win98.

 

DonaldP, your 2 gig hard drive and 20% free is probably the reason. A bigger hard drive would certainly reduce the need for defragging. I have a 15 gig partition as my C drive and I still defrag every day. Still lots of room on C:, but I like to keep files contiguous, as much as possible. With a 2 gig drive your files will be scattered like shotgun shot, all over the drive, wherever it can find blocks that are free to write to. With a bigger drive, with more free space, it doesn't have to scatter parts of files as much.

Try these 3, they will free up space after every session on the net. Might also help as well.

Cleanup! http://www.stevengould.org/
EmpTemp http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=1575
and CrapCleaner aka CCleaner http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4191

Baz

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I'm back.
Thanks for all the replies. I've since used the (3) suggested files for cleaning up and am hovering around 20%. I was mistaken in my first post about my fragmentation %; it was lower. SO, I need some serious housecleaning
and continued maintainence to stay online. It seems to me that I don't have as many files on this machine as are shown.

Thanks again to all of you for being present and willing to help.
Tomorrows saga: Win XP Pro that locks up after the splash screen; this is new as of yesterday.

BE well.

 

Glad the 3 helped, if only in a minor way. I don't think the situation will improve until you either delete a hell of a lot of files, or fit a greater capacity hard drive. You are going to be stuck with frequent defrags until then. I hope 1 of the 3 didn't delete something important to XP Pro. I use them every day, in W98SE, with no trouble. Baz

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