The "ultimate joy and goodness" attained by keeping one's hard drive defragmented has been duly noted, both in the previous comments in this thread, and in many other "Tech" threads. Quite a few people have indicated that they have a really tough time getting through a defrag. Various 'catters (and guests) have suggested a number of "things you can close" to speed up the defrag - mostly good suggestions, but a few somewhat questionable.

Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q186978 "Drive's Contents Have Changed: Restarting..." Message When You Use the Disk Defragmenter Tool. gives a couple of simple(?) ways to "clean start" your machine so that defrag doesn't keep "cycling."

Recommended: Use the clicky to read the article, and print it for future reference.

For those who really want just the "quicky:"

START - PROGRAMS - ACCESSORIES - SYSTEM TOOLS - SYSTEM INFORMATION

On the System Information TOOLS menu, click SYSTEM CONFIGURATION UTILITY

On the GENERAL tab, click SELECTIVE STARTUP, and "Clear" check boxes for:
Process Config.sys File (if available)
Process Autoexec.bat File (if available)
Process Winstart.bat File (if available)
Process System.ini File
Process Win.ini File
Load Startup Group Items

This amounts to "clear all the boxes," in most cases.

When you click OK your machine will tell you when to reboot - and you will then be in "clean" (and dumb) mode. Run Defrag (START - PROGRAMS - ACCESSORIES - SYSTEM TOOLS - Disk Defragmenter if you've forgotten).

When defrag finishes, go back to SYSTEM CONFIGURATION UTILITY - GENERAL TAB and click NORMAL STARTUP - OK. Reboot when prompted.

The alternate procedure is to boot to SAFE Mode to run defrag. If you're feeling "wonkish" that's ok, but most people don't find operating in Safe Mode very "friendly."

There is a DOS version of defrag, and it can be run if you boot to DOS, but there have been reports of its "losing long file name" information.

Note that if your disk is badly fragmented, it can still take quite a while to run a first (or first few) defrag. Don't be discouraged - it gets better once you get it in better shape.

John