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To run Windows 98 Disk Defragmenter,

1. Click on the Start button.
2. Click Programs.
3. Click Accessories.
4. Click System Tools.
5. Click Disk Defragmenter.

Description:

The goal of Defrag is to minimize seeks while launching an application. The new feature in Defrag works better on 4K cluster drives than it does on 16K or 32K cluster partitions. This is because memory pages are faulted in 4K chunks. A greater-than-4K cluster size is going to restrict how well a disk can be rearranged to minimize seeks. With 32K clusters, the second page that needs to be read during an application launch does not often fall in the same cluster as the first page to be read. With 4K clusters, these pages can be placed adjacent to each other. With larger cluster sizes, the 2 pages are forced to be non-adjacent due to the other information contained in the >4K cluster size.

Over time, as programs read from and write to a hard disk, information stored on the disk can become fragmented - that is, files are stored in noncontiguous sectors. Fragmentation doesn't affect the validity of the information - the files are still complete when they are opened.

It takes much longer for the computer to read and write fragmented files than it does for unfragmented files. Previous versions of the Disk Defragmenter used by Windows 950, 950a, 950b, 950c, optimized a disk by grouping individual files together in contiguous clusters.

While grouping clusters together is a good method for reducing the time to open files, what happens if several files used to open a program are not grouped together? It is possible that two files used to open the same program are at opposite ends of the disk. This still produces a slow startup time for an application.

The significant change to Disk Defragmenter relocates the executable and supporting files of Windows programs to a single contiguous area of your hard drive. This placing of a program and all of its supporting files into contiguous disk space can significantly increase the speed at which the application loads and executes.

Disk Defragmenter is also different in that it can literally fragment program files to improve start times.

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