Re: Trouble reading drive? Fragmentation or RAM problem?

Word and Firefox do not have to scan the drives. Backup and defrag programs do. That would be the main difference.

As an aside, if I may make a suggestion; in order to avoid a lot fragmentation in the first place, don't use the Save command in Word and Windows and use the Save As command instead. Save saves just the changed fragment and puts it in the next available place on the drive (thus the file is fragmented). Save As writes a whole new file (which is thus contiguous) and deletes the old version.

"Jeff" <jeff@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:%23dDEuwGXIHA.2268@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The drive is not nearly full, but it is only a small 40G drive with 3 partitions. C: has 5G free out of 15G, and the other partitions are much emptier.

Anyway, I deleted a whole bunch of accumulated Windows update backup files, and now things are somewhat faster (though still too slow). Having gotten True Image to do full backups I am now proceeding with a badly needed defrag. Maybe that will help things further.

MS Word and Firefox do not seem to run slow on this laptop. Just things like True Image and the like.

Jeff

Colin Barnhorst wrote:
If the drive is nearly full all of these processes will take forever
to execute. It sounds a little like the disk might be nearly full
but I'm just guessing. PerfectDisk will work with under the
recommended 15% free space on the disk, but slowly. The problem with
a nearly full disk is that analytical processes need room for temp
files while they work or they have to take on the tasks in tinier
bites.
"Jeff" <jeff@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:u4uJ9lFXIHA.4432@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
This has to do with my wife's older laptop (Pentium 4, 2.66Ghz, 512
MB ram) which runs XP Home, fully updated. It has a C:\ system
partition and 2 other data partitions plus a USB drive I use for
backups. I recently tried to use Acronis's True Image 7 to back the C:
partition and noticed that it took forever "analyzing" each
partition. I really mean forever. So much so that I needed to abort
it. I assumed her partitions must be badly fragmented. So I went to
the installed "PerfectDisk" software she had on her laptop and tried
to fragment it. Again it took forever to do the analysis phase and
never got much beyond it so that I had to force it to stop.

I became very concerned. Using Windows Tools I checked the C:
partition and it also took a long time but apparently found no
errors because it sent me to notice that it found anything wrong.

I then told Windows to do a chkdsk (with both correction boxes
selected) of C: - which of course it could only do on reboot - and I
rebooted. As requested chkdsk of C: did its thing on reboot. What
I noticed is that stage 1: went by fast
stage 2: "Is verifying indexes" - stayed at 0% for a long time (2
minutes?) before proceeding to the 1-100% which then went reasonably
fast. stage 3: "Verifying security descriptors" - same thing: stayed
at 0% for a very long time before then progressing reasonably fast
from 1-100%. stage 4: "verifying file data" did not act stuck in the pre-0% stage
like the others, but just progressed very slowly through 1-100%.
stage 5: "free space" just progressed slowly but steadily.

No errors found.

Does any of this indicate some problem? I do not recall having this
problem when I used True Image or Perfect Disk previously on her PC.

**It all started because True Image took so long in the "analyzing
partitions" phase (several minutes which never completed) that it
seemed impractical to use it for backup and then Perfect Disk
defragmenter did the same.

Jeff



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