Anyway, I switched boot up drives, (a 40 gig drive) and re-loaded ME and all the other programs I need, minus a few funky ones I don't need.

I think I might have made an error. I copied an entire directory about 2 gigs worth of pictures, MOV's, AVI's, etc. to the boot drive. Then, I made a new directory, and eliminated all the duplicate stuff from the 2 gig directory. The new directory turns out to be about 1.3 gigs.

Then, I deleted the entire 2 gig directory, and copied a 10 gig directory of wav files, and a 800 meg directory of MP3 files from the old boot drive.

When I finished, the machine seems to run very nicely, boots up fast, etc. So, I decided to defrag the drive. I started to defrag it about 6 hours ago, and it is still munching on it.

If I watch it, it will go through its sequence, then after shoveling crap around, it quits.....like it is talking to itself and saying, "This shit won't fit" and starts over again. It has been doing that since I started the defrag program, and it has finally reached the 79% complete mark. I would suspect it will want to munch on it for another two hours or more before it is finished.

I think I stuffed too much data down its throat.

I wonder if it will work when it is finished defragging.

ME vs. 2000 vs. XP: As someone else said, Windows 2000 Professional with Service Pack 2 is amazingly stable. When I was working at Dynamix (game developer), all our programmers and artists ran on Win2K and I can count the number of blue-screen crashes on the thumb of one hand (and that turned out to be a Novell client driver issue, not a Windows issue). I'm running XP Home Version on this PC, and so far it has been perfectly stable for me as well.

More about Macintoshes: Mac users brag about the stability of their systems compared to Windows. Give me a break! Those early iMacs should never have gone into production. They were notoriously unstable. Steve Jobs' "Cube" system was plagued by overheating problems. My Dad's iMac still, to this day, freezes up on him several times a week, and all he does with it is web surfing and occasionally printing stuff out. That's it! He isn't running multiple applications or doing anything exotic. The hardware has been swapped, the firmware is up to date, yadda yadda, but it still likes to lock up. Apple support kept insisting "Oh, you just need more RAM, or the latest OS patch, the problem is your printer, blah bhal". The Macs we ran at Dynamix were no more reliable than WinTel systems. It makes no difference if the problem is in the hardware or the software, to the user it's an unstable work platform.

What puzzled me is that in addition to the excessiv time it took, scandisk initiated when I booted up (the computer was shut down properly). I wonder if defrag might have been working around a lost file....I don't know.

BTW of all the Windows 9x OSs, ME is the worst. If you really need to run a 9x version of Windows I recommend 98 Second Edition. For NT like others have said, use 2000 with Service Pack 2.

Thanks for the info.

 |  IP: Logged

 |  IP: Logged

Later, after the big bad new corporate owners came along, they decided all this stuff could be outsourced, so they let all the sound & music people go. But we did keep a video production department, headed by a guy named Jim Carey (no, not THAT Jim Carrey). That video group did some amazing work. Dynamix video stuff was the envy of the rest of the company. That group is still working for the new owner (Vivendi Universal) in Bellevue.

Sorry, probably more than you wanted to know.