Slow Defrag

I am trying to speed up a friends laptop. He has a Gateway Solo 1100. Celeron proc with a 4GB hard drive and 32MB of RAM. I started defragging yesterday and 28 hours later we are at 35% complete. I got the view details window opened and it is working, just very slowly. I have never seen anything like this.

I am using the standard win98 defragger and am in safemode. What am I missing here?

 

Sounds to me like 32 bit disk access is disabled. I take it he has either 95 or 98 installed.

Could be a BIOS setting or ......


Taken from http://www.knowplace.org/32-bit.html You will want to do #4.
[font=arial, helvetica, sans-serif]Win9x: [/font]

• [font=arial, helvetica, sans-serif]Well, you're in luck. Win9x is a 32-bit operating system. You won't have to do much of anything. To check if everything is running 32-bit, double click (while holding down the ALT key) on My Computer (if you didnt' name it something else). Click on Performance, and if the File System and Virtual Memory says it's running 32-bit, you're in fine shape. [/font]
• [font=arial, helvetica, sans-serif]But my system says it's running (some or all) under compatibility mode! Well, there are a few reasons why your system might not be running everything 32-bit. [/font]
  1. [font=arial, helvetica, sans-serif]Virus: Yes, I said the V-word. Common viruses that cause this are the NYB boot-virus and the Monkey.B boot-virus (you might have something else, but these were once fairly wide-spread). While they are fairly harmless and transparent, they are nevertheless viruses and you should remove it. Scan your system with any popular virus program (McAfee, F-Prot, NAV, etc.). If it notifies you that you've got a boot virus, get a clean bootup disk from a friend and remove the virus. Once you've cleaned the virus off your system, everything will run 32-bit. It'll even fix some device conflicts you may have been experiencing (most likely some disk controller conflict). If your CD-ROM drive suddenly disappears, this is probably the reason why. [/font]
  2. [font=arial, helvetica, sans-serif]Old equipment: If you have an old CD-ROM drive or disk controller, it may not permit you to run them 32-bit. Solution? Upgrade! [/font]
  3. [font=arial, helvetica, sans-serif]16-bit DOS Drivers: If you're loading old 16-bit DOS drivers (most likely for your CD-ROM), then it forces Win9x to access your drive in 16-bit mode. Solution: Remove the device driver(s) (and MSCDEX.EXE) from your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. Win9x has its own 32-bit virtual drivers which allow it to access your CD-ROM in 32-bit protected mode. However, this means you won't be able to access your CD-ROM if you quit out of Win9x. [/font]
  4. [font=arial, helvetica, sans-serif]Disabled: 32-bit support may have been turned off. Click on the File System (at the bottom left of the Performance window), then Trouble Shooting. Make sure you don't have checks next to anything (particularily the Disable protect-mode hard disk interrupt handling and Disable all 32-bit protect-mode drivers). Note: While write behind caching may speed up some disk operations, if your system tends to lock up or crash, you may want to consider disabling this feature. If your system locks or crashes before the cached data was written to hard disk, the data is lost forever. [/font]

Hope this helps.