gusse wrote:-

.... Or should I approach
the problem in a different way?

You could try running scandisk (and defrag) in Safe Mode and see if there's
an improvement or you could even try running scandisk in Real Mode DOS (N.B
defrag will NOT run in DOS). But be aware that you *might* just have a
faulty hard drive and therefore you *might* be putting your data at risk.

To run scandisk in Real Mode DOS, boot, using the WinMe Startup (floppy)
Disk and select 'With CD-ROM Support', then at the A:\ prompt, type
"scandisk c:" (no quotes and note the colon) and then press Return.

Follow the screen prompts - and for the first time at least, (unless you are
happy that either the disk is OK, or you can sacrifice your data) tell it
NOT to do a Surface Scan. See what it reports and keep a check on its
progress.

If it reports major problems, copy your important data to another drive (or
CD-R) before attempting to write (surface scan) to the disk.

If all is well with your HDD, but you are still seeing the "something is
running in the background " reports, then download and install ScanDefrag
v5.2.

This is a FREE utility, written by several well respected contributors to
these News Groups and has been designed to run several original MS utilities
through a 'filter' which eliminates the usual junk which stops Scandisk (and
Defrag) from running properly in Normal Mode - as you are already
experiencing g

You can get ScanDefrag at either of the two sites below - and be sure to
read the associated notes for setting it up:
http://home.earthlink.net/~bblanton2...efrag/main.htm
http://www.blueorbsoft.com/scandefrag/index.html

HTH and good luck

Mart



"gusse" wrote in message
...
My system is slow. I cannot defragment because I need to run ScanDisk for
bad
sectors and cannot run scan disk because something is running in the
background and writing to the C: drive. I assume there are programs
running
I am not aware of. (I disabled virus and spyware to see if they were the
problem and that was not it.) What is it safe to stop running in the
start-up
file? I figured out how to get in the system config, but didn't know what
I
needed and what could be stopped under the Start-Up tab. Or should I
approach
the problem in a different way?
--
gusse