billf
05-30-2002, 11:17 PM
Hi,
I'm new to these forums, even though I have been lurking here for a while. I've seen some good information pass through here, and sometimes read the threads just to educate myself about the problems people encounter with their PC's.
I have a problem with one of my computers that may be a Windows 98 problem. Last time I tried to defrag my hard drive, defrag would not run to completion. The same phenomenon was observed for scandisk. The program would start checking the disk, and then it would start over. I have observed before that if scandisk is running while another application is writing to the disk, scandisk restarts its scan every time the disk is written. It is as if something is writing to the hard drive and scandisk wants to start over. This may be related to other problems I am having with the system, such as installing Norton System Works and it seems to affect the performance of some programs that ran well before. (And maybe they're unrelated.) All problems started to happen at the same time. My theory is that some process is running that writes to the disk every so often, and I have observed behavior recently that makes me think that some process is stealing a little time here and there. I have observed disk access every 30-40 seconds that I never noticed before. The computer is an AMD K6-2-500 and was upgraded from 64 to 512 MB of RAM early this year.
In the process of troubleshooting this problem, I have observed the following:
- The problem is not present in safe mode.
- I have disabled every program that is listed on the msconfig tabs (startup, win.ini, etc.), but doing so does not seem to help.
- I have about 75% system memory free, according to Win 98.
- The original OS was upgarded from Win 95 running on a (cough) Packard Bell. I did not do a clean install, but had no problems until recently.
Does anyone have any ideas of what to do next? (Besides format C, then reinstall which may happen soon if I cannot solve this problem.) Any ideas or help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks
I'm new to these forums, even though I have been lurking here for a while. I've seen some good information pass through here, and sometimes read the threads just to educate myself about the problems people encounter with their PC's.
I have a problem with one of my computers that may be a Windows 98 problem. Last time I tried to defrag my hard drive, defrag would not run to completion. The same phenomenon was observed for scandisk. The program would start checking the disk, and then it would start over. I have observed before that if scandisk is running while another application is writing to the disk, scandisk restarts its scan every time the disk is written. It is as if something is writing to the hard drive and scandisk wants to start over. This may be related to other problems I am having with the system, such as installing Norton System Works and it seems to affect the performance of some programs that ran well before. (And maybe they're unrelated.) All problems started to happen at the same time. My theory is that some process is running that writes to the disk every so often, and I have observed behavior recently that makes me think that some process is stealing a little time here and there. I have observed disk access every 30-40 seconds that I never noticed before. The computer is an AMD K6-2-500 and was upgraded from 64 to 512 MB of RAM early this year.
In the process of troubleshooting this problem, I have observed the following:
- The problem is not present in safe mode.
- I have disabled every program that is listed on the msconfig tabs (startup, win.ini, etc.), but doing so does not seem to help.
- I have about 75% system memory free, according to Win 98.
- The original OS was upgarded from Win 95 running on a (cough) Packard Bell. I did not do a clean install, but had no problems until recently.
Does anyone have any ideas of what to do next? (Besides format C, then reinstall which may happen soon if I cannot solve this problem.) Any ideas or help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks