Originally posted by GilesGuthrie
Firstly: These days, if you have a reasonable amount of free space on your drive, you don't really need to worry about defragmenting. Drives are so fast these days that it doesn't give much of a speed advantage.
Secondly: If you want to defragment your drive, you would do better buying something like Norton Utilities. The Speed Disk component of NU is actually intellligent, tracking your usage of files, and placing strategic files next to each other, so that, for example, all the files needed to start Word are placed together, in order. This allows your drive to simply stream the contents into memory, and does provide a significant speed improvement.
The W98 defrag routine is worthless.