24th December 2001
Too many times have I seen or heard the problem of Defrag getting to 10% and then restarting. Our solution is usually to reboot and run the system utility in Safe Mode. Sometimes, however, that may be unnecessary. Windows XP users will never run into this problem. However, if you've got 98 or ME on your machine, then pay attention. In the Registry, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Applets \ Defrag \ Settings. Now, you'll see a list of four important subkeys: Disable loadqm.exe, Disable loadwc.exe, Disable ScreenSaver, and Disable Wkdetect.exe. Guess what you're going to do now? Double- click each of those entries' (Default) values and set them to "YES" (in the right-hand pane). But what else usually gets interrupted with disk activity? Scandisk. So, in the same Applets hierarchy, scroll down the list until you see the Scandisk key. Continue to cascade through to its Settings key and you'll find: Disable loadqm.exe, Disable loadwc.exe, and Disable ScreenSaver. Do the same thing here as you did for the Defrag key. NOTE: this will only suspend operation of those utilities while Defrag or Scandisk are being run. LOADWC.EXE (Windows Update Checker), LOADQM.EXE (Query Manager), and WKDETECT.EXE (Update Checker for Microsoft Works) can safely be turned off in the Startup tab of MSCONFIG. Props to Keith Hall for pointing this out!