XP Chkdisk and Defrag

[DaveP57]

My question concerns WinXP's Checkdisk and Defragmenter. I'm new to Windows XP; I finally saved the cash to purchase a new tower running WinXP Pro. My old system ran Win98SE. I used to run scandisk and defragment at least two or three times a week when running Win98, but XP seems so much more stable than 98 that I hardly ever bother with it anymore. How often should I concern myself with running these utilities in Windows XP? Also, when I run the Chkdsk utility, XP tells me that Chkdsk needs exclusive rights to the hard drive and that the utility can only be run after a re-boot; After the re-boot Chkdsk starts and notifies my that it is running, and flashes a summary report visible for only about 2 seconds on my machine. Is there any way I can access the chdsk summary to see whats going on? Do I need to even worry about it? Thanks for your help!

 

[4Ryan6]

As far as CHKDSK if it finds problems it fixes them I hope, but you're right it goes by so fast you can't see it, haven't tried pressing pause when it gets to that point yet but that may work, in Win98SE you had to give it permission to fix the errors it found. I personally use a high speed defragging program and not the WinXP defragger, because I do some video recompiling, and defrag on a regular basis. You'll be OK with running defrag once a week at your convenience and CHKDSK once a week also.

<b><font color=purple>Details, Details, Its all in the Details, If you need help, Don't leave out the Details.</font color=purple></b>

 

[DaveP57]

Thanks 4ryan6. I pretty much agree on running these two utilities about once a week, cept I usually run both before a new software installation. I'll try hitting the pause key at the chkdsk summary and see what happens. Thanks for your reply, and have a great day.