I've decided that I shouldn't put it off any longer!FS9 is running ok but my last defrag was....ermmm...last year!!Trouble is it takes so long to do. I believe that regular defragmentation makes the process a lot quicker. In the meantime, are there any programs available that could make this defrag a lot quicker. I promise to do my defrags on a more regular basis. Honest!:D Victor

Well it's late so I think I'll use the tried and trusted XP default defragmentor. It shows I'm about 40% fragmented. Doesn't sound that bad really!! ;)

Just keep it over night. Default windows XP defrag isn

Hi Victor,"Well it's late so I think I'll use the tried and trusted XP default defragmentor."....wise decision. You don't need any 3rd party utilities for this job as there's nothing wrong with Windows XP's Defragmenter and , yes, you are correct it will take a while to complete if it's some time since it was last run. Good tip: Run it at least 3 times/session on each drive/partition for optimum results. After the first run you will find subsequent runs to be much faster - usually only minutes or even seconds on a well maintained drive. I tend to run defragmenter on my 2 drives every few days and I certainly wouldn't do that if it didn't complete in just a few minutes. MikeHitachi Deskstar 7K250 (160GB) + IBM Deskstar 120GXP UDMA100 (40 GB)

Hi Victor, if you haven't defragged for such a long time, it will take a while. Do it more frequently and it's a matter of minutes. Sometimes, a very slow defrag is also a sign of not running in DMA-mode. Say anything longer than 60mins for 10GB of data, might be a hint in that direction. I'm sorry I'm not able to point you towards specific tools. On the other hand, inverting the original question, doesn't Windows have all the adequate tools aboard? Or what about the 'Professional' mention on the packaging of my OS? A funny story (maybe?): A computer mag from Germany recently reviewed popular tweaking tools. Unfortunately, the results were embarrasing! The absolutely BEST tweaking proggie scored a performance LOSS of 1.5%!! Conclusion maybe, leave it to Beaver and just defrag more often? FS l

Well in that sense the O&O is quite a lot faster. You don

I can personally recommend Diskeeper as the best defrag utlity out there - the defragger in XP is a stripped-down version of Diskeeper and I use the Diskeeper Pro 9.0 version which has all the bells and whistles put back in including Master File Table defragmentation, optional boot-time defragging (the most efficient form of defragmenting a Windows drive) and most useful of all, options to set dedrag to start at certain specific times (like the default) or under certain conditions - such as when the screensaver cuts in. Used regularly, defragging takes only seconds which is useful because I often work with very large sound or music files and folders and the drives can get very fragmented very quickly. FS also uses large files and folders so it's a good idea to make defragmenting a regular part of weekly maintenance, alongside clearing the temp files, prefetch folder, purging the deleted files from the recycle bin and looking for any urgent Windows updates.Allcott

Thanks for the replies everybody.

In addition to diskkeeper, there is the freeware version, diskeeper lite. Here's the download link:http://www.webattack.com/get/dkeeperlite.shtmlbtw, the download page will tell you to go to another address. ignore that and download from the page you are looking at. the only difference I know of between the payware and freeware versions is that the freeware can be programmed to only defrag one hd at a time or one partition at a time. otherwise, it works like a gem.Sherm