Wyo,

There's never a humane way to take a life and that of course is what has happened to your hard disk. "Frag" or "fragging," you may remember, is a term that originated in the military during the Viet Nam war; a rather unpleasant business. Since computers are a major source of frustration and anger for most people, some people have been know to go over the edge and "frag" their hard drive. Defragging, then, is the process of bringing your hard drive back into service after it has been "fragged" by one of the troops.

Seriously though, the most effective way to speed up a personal computer is to add real memory (RAM). This is far more helpful than adding machine cycles (processor speed). I wouldn't run Win 95 for real work in less than 80MB or so. As I type this note, I'm using a ~330MHz Pentium with 256MB RAM and a 6.5GB hard disk running NT 4.0 Workstation. Did I mention that my hard disk is almost full and I already have the 10GB replacement drive loaded with Win2K?

As a rule of thumb, never allow the available space on your C: drive to dip below 300MB or so and, as Bill suggested, defragment your available space so it's all together at the end of the drive. Your OS needs swap space for vitrual memory and your browser needs cache space as well.

- Mark