System slow – windows defrag leaving 88 files fragmented – Help!

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I have never encountered this before – have been using Windows defrag forever with no problems. But recently it is not defragging up to 88 files – no matter how many times I run it. System is running horribly. I need to shut down Chrome about every half hour! It acts up the most when reading email in MSN Outlook – my main email account. Very frustrating.

what I’ve done to try and fix:

[*]deleted old Registry Mechanic (no longer supported)
[*]installed Ccleaner (free version) and ran all tools
[*]ran all system tools built in (disk clean up, defrag, removed all but most recent restore pt)
[*]Uninstalled old programs not used to free up space
[*]run Trojan killer every night – nothing found for about 2 weeks now
[*]checked disk for errors
[*]ran clean disk at startup
[*]compressed hard drive to save space
Installed and ran Aulogics Defragging – which erroneously reports everything defragged!

My system is Windows XP and I use the Chrome browser mostly. I now have only about 8Gb free space left with about 43GB used. :confused:

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Hi, Clueless

The 88 files might not fit into the contiguous free space available – it’s simply that your drive is too full (this in itself would impact performance).

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Thanks – but what do I do? How can I clear it out enough so that it defrags all the way?

Hi, Clueless

The 88 files might not fit into the contiguous free space available – it’s simply that your drive is too full (this in itself would impact performance).

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Get a bigger drive so you don’t have to compress would be one way. Once upon a time if I had a similar problem I would search for the largest non-system files and copy them off and also the files that won’t defrag if they are not system files until there is plenty of room to defrag (20-25% free space). Then the process of copying the files back onto the drive should keep them un-fragmented provided there is enough contiguous space for them.

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Cluelesspc,

have you cleaned for junk-files? Use Ccleaner weekly to clean the system and the registry. Check your C:drive for free space, at least 30%, elseware uninstall some large applikation, such as Google Chrome …

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I would not concern myself much with what Windows defrag reports as remaining fragmented files.
Quite often these files are in use and will not be defragmented. Other utilities recognize this and simply ignore them.
Good chance it has zero to do with your current sluggish system issues problem.

Your problem, at least the one that we can see, is your drive is nearly full.

Thanks – but what do I do? How can I clear it out enough so that it defrags all the way?

Start dumping personal data, like videos and photos etc., move it off to a DVD disk or external drive.
Better yet, purchase a 200 or 300GB, 7500 or 10000 rpm drive for the operating system, and a 1 or 2TB internal drive
for storage space. Then reinstall XP.

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