Disk Maintenance for 9x

Get It Try It

Your Wintel box running 9x is no household appliance. It would be great if it were - just turn it on, run it, turn it off, never worry about it - but anything running a Microsoft operating system, no matter how many k3wl features, will never be as stable as that. So cut out your whining and complaining and get down to it!

You really only need about half an hour a day. It's better to schedule this at the end of a session rather than at the beginning so you know it's going to get done. You need to do two things basically: check the integrity of your disks and then defragment them.

It's important for both phases of your check that you do not do anything else while these programs run. If your browser is still open, close it. If you have any other utilities running, close them as well. If you have an AV utility running, close this down too for now.

Start by checking the disk integrity. Go to your Start menu, Run, then 'Scandskw'. Choose all hard drives when the Scandisk utility comes up, then let it run. You don't want to do a low-level check with this utility: it's not good enough. If Scandisk should ever complain that there are low-level hardware errors on your drive, check instead to see if your disk OEM has included a diagnostic diskette along with the drive and run that instead. You need to stick around for this part as Scandisk will issue a modal dialog after the run on each disk is complete, and you need to click this dialog away.

Once you've completed the Scandisk runs, it's time to reboot to begin the defragging; but before you do, make sure as few programs as possible will be running when the system comes back up. Again, if you have AV running, disable it. If you know how to go into your Registry and find your 'Run' keys, then do it - and temporarily rename them 'Ran', 'RanOnce', 'RanServices' etc. until the defrag is complete. In order to save time and minimize the number of restarts, you really want to see that as close to nothing at all is running in your box when you begin the defrag.

When you reboot, go again to your Start menu, Run, and 'Defrag'. When the Defrag box comes up, choose 'All Hard Drives' then click OK. If you want to watch the show as it works, click 'Show Details' now.

You don't have to stick around while Defrag works, as it will proceed seamlessly from one drive to another and finish on its own. The first time around it might take a while, as the disks might be in a mess; but if you do this every day the operation should proceed painlessly and quickly. And you don't need any extra expensive defrag utilities either: The built-in system defragger is fully good enough.