hey guys
im defraggin the old computers hdd usin the tool on win 98 cus its runnin like a bag of crap...
at 1st, everythin seems ok, but as u go down the list of sectors there are a ton of sectors that are "data that will not be moved", the white 1s with the little red bit in!!

what exactly are these? they are dotted all over the place!!

iv got a load of big white free space areas then a load more data, then a load od free space... grrr
wanky computers, lol...

should i see a big improvement in performance?

cheers

mabbo

Edited because of offensive language.

These are more than likely Windows system files that are in use and therefore can't be moved whislt you're defraggin'

The performance increase you'll see depends on how fragmented your drive is, i.e. the more fragmentation the better performance will be when its done.

hi, i run a windows 98 machine - when you run the defrag - if you look at the summary it tells you what all the different colours mean. the white square with red in it are bad sectors.

If you indeed have bad sectors, the only way to fix it is by using a low level format utility which can "write out" the bad sectors. But first, I'd suggest a second opinion on that. Try running a different defrag utility. I have seen the Windows defrag utility for 9x report almost half a partition as having bad sectors, yet SpeedDisk or DiskKeeper could defrag the entire partition and showed no unmovable data or give any errors.
On the other hand, if you run another defrag tool and get similar results, back up your data, then run a drive diagnostic utility that has the ability to low level format.

If you let Windows dynamically change the swap file it will make lots of blocks of fragmented swap file all over the disk. These will then cause further fragmentation of apps and data. It will also grow as more and more apps are added to the system and more things run in the background. The more fragmentation the more time your HD spends seeking to non-contiguous tracks and waiting for the disk drive is what makes computers sluggish. If you don't have a lot of ram the drive will spend a lot of time running around the disk to access the various parts of the swap file.

What I do in the beginning, is set a fixed swap file before I install a lot of apps. It doesn't fragment and is usually near the middle of the disk, where it doesn't take long to seek the head to the swap file. It can be difficult later on to get it set to a fixed size in one single block and if you're sucessful you will probably wind up with the swap file at the end of your disk a long ways away from the optimized sorting of your Win98 apps.