Mike:
Sadly Win Me doesn't have an Event Log such as is in XP where you
could check if the system was having problems accessing the hard disk.

I'll check this on my system that is running XP (if I can find what you mean
Yes, system has been defragged, but to no avail

Thanks, Richard

Mike M wrote:
Thanks Mart for stepping in. I was rather busy elsewhere for most of
yesterday afternoon and evening so didn't have a chance to check for any
follow-up from Richard.

Richard,

As Mart has said a slow application doesn't necessarily mean that the disk
is bad. Sadly Win Me doesn't have an Event Log such as is in XP where you
could check if the system was having problems accessing the hard disk. I
can't recall whether you have run chkdsk or not or whether this reports
that you have any bad blocks or not. Even so with modern hard disks with
SMART, mapping out of bad disk blocks tends to be done on the fly by the
disk itself and the operating system and chkdsk will normally only come in
to play when all of the spare hardware blocks have been consumed.

Since we are talking Win Me you are using FAT32 as the filing system on
the hard drive. FAT32 is far more susceptible to slow down if fragmented
than say NTFS filing system which is used by most systems running XP.
Have you therefore recently defragged the drive?
You haven't yet really made a case for suspecting the HDD. You have
only mentioned that it is a particular Access 2003 .mdb file which is
[quoted text clipped - 22 lines]
disk clean'. It's not exactly 'selective' - it'll wipe the lot,
requiring a full install etc.

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