First a word about what the DEFAG program actually does.

You need no technical knowledge to understand the basic principles.
As I will try to explain in totally inaccurate layman's language.

At the end of the scan, SCAN DISK told me that I had 16kb in
each allocation unit

Windows 98 introduced for the first time a thing called FAT 32.
FAT means File Allocation Tables, and basically it enabled hard
drives to be reformatted to contain the maximum number of allocation
units, removing previous restrictions that were in Windows 95.
Allocation units are commonly referred to as clusters.

But because there still is a restriction on the maximum number of
clusters that can be handled by the software and hard drives have
become much bigger in recent times, the size of your individual
cluster depends upon the size of your hard drive.

For example:- a 2.5 gig hard drive will have 4 kb clusters and
a 25 gig hard drive has 16kb clusters.  The bigger the hard drive
the bigger the size of each individual cluster.

Now I like to think of a cluster as a suitcase, which in my computer
has a 16kb capacity before it becomes full.  All your software
is contained within these suitcases and then they are arranged
within the hard drive.

Unfortunately computers are not too clever, so it packs a pair of
socks (1kb) into one suitcase (cluster) and then considers it full.
In this situation there is in fact 15kb wasted space.  If your clusters
are  bigger, then it follows that the space wasted with a 1kb file
becomes bigger

If in my case if I had a file 32kb in size, it would totally fill
two related suitcases (clusters) with no wasted space.

So hopefully you will see that by carrying out Parts 1 to 5
inclusive, we have got rid of the stuff we did not want and
at the same time emptied many suitcases (clusters) on our
hard drive.  Many files you have already deleted in this process
were very small files resulting in many "half" full suitcases.

The DEFRAG program is going to read all your software and
then write it back to your hard drive, ensuring in the process
that all empty clusters are moved to the end of the drive. You
can watch this happen on your monitor.

It therefore follows that if your software is re-arranged in a
logical order, your computer programs will run faster and
your personal frustration level is reduced.  A hard drive that
is badly fragmented will slow down computer operation,
to the point that it is certainly noticeable at times.

Windows 98 will also set up your hard drive, to ensure that your
computer programs will start as quickly as possible, during the DEFAG
Process.  This is a welcome improvement over Windows 95.

Now select START then PROGRAMS then ACCESSORIES
Then select SYSTEM TOOLS and then DISK DEFRAGMENTER
The screen below appears.

Hit SHOW DETAILS and the screen below appears
So now you can see the clusters being read
and then re-written to your hard drive



Hit the LEGEND button and up-pops the screen below



This screen explains the meaning of
the colour coding given to each cluster