Before You Call Me
(Try this stuff)
FOREWORD: I get called daily, for all the craziest stuff. Microsloth's famous Blue Screen Of Death is locking someone's use of a computer. I try to teach everyone how to do their own system checks and routine maintenance, but its not like owning a car. Everyone owns a computer, many people are self-professed computer technicians (or worse, they are A+ Certified) but a rare few, live and breath what they preach. I do... I have computers (and tons of parts) where laundry baskets should be kept, and a garage that has never seen a car. You should see the brake fluid and black streaks on my street when I do cleanup (everyone thinks I am throwing out Pentium III parts). Ok, that's the forword, let's cut to the chase....
 

SCANDISK: Sometimes things get scrambled on your drive.Caused by normal use, an unfinished file from a download, repeated deleting and sometimes just an improper shutdown. (Windoze doesn't like it when you just flick the ON/OFF button) Try running SCANDISK first... before defragmentation of your hard drive (Defrag will be covered in a minute)
 

DISK DEFRAGMENTER: Look at the above picture, the Disk Defragmenter is 5 above SCANDISK. This will sort your files, often they are fragmented into small pieces scattered all over the hard drive. In seeking the program, the computer will waste time searching for segments that are separated from one another. Running DEFRAG will increase your performance speed and reduce errors.

Both SCANDISK and DEFRAG are programs I recommend you get familiar with. They don't harm anything, although running DEFRAG too often just adds wear and tear to your hard drive. If you do lots of downloading, deleting and moving files, you should think about running DEFRAG once a week. If you wait too long, it will take more time. Here's another hint. If you have some programs installed on your computer, that run in the background, accessing your hard drive, you will find DEFRAG never seems to finish. This is because it is trying to move files and parts of files, to place them together, and some program you are running, is accessing the hard drive. DEFRAG will keep starting and restarting. You should see this:

and go to Settings and make them look like this:
 

I recommend you run DEFRAG with all other applications shut down, usually best while you are sleeping, and don't do it while on the Internet. If you have problems finding which program is accessing your hard drive, just hold CTRL and ALT keys down, and tap DEL once. A window will appear telling you which applications are running, and you can highlight the program, and choose END TASK. If you choose the wrong one, and your system says it will shut down, just choose cancel. That program is obviously needed to run, to keep Windoze running.

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