need advice

[James]

First off... I admit that I should never have used Norton's Speed disk
(but... I did). Nothing was the same after that... some icons were missing
from my Quick Launch... the computer was not reacting as quickly as
formerly. Anyway... I ran a Restore and things "appear" to be back to
normal. Now my questions:

1. Should I run a defrag using MS tools or did the Restore I ran put the
files (swap file as well) back where they belong?
(I had run a defrag about two weeks ago using MS tools)

2. Is there anything (other than not using Speed Disk) that you would advise
to ensure that all is well?

 

[Kevin]

The "restore" will have simply reinstalled the operating system. If you
were to do a clean install with a format you would be wiping the hard drive
and installing the OS. All the files associated with the OS should be where
the OS expects them to be.

 

[Alex Nichol]

1. Should I run a defrag using MS tools or did the Restore I ran put the
files (swap file as well) back where they belong?
(I had run a defrag about two weeks ago using MS tools)

No - that will only copy back files as needed - it will not arrange them
tidily - indeed may make things worse. So run the MS defrag

2. Is there anything (other than not using Speed Disk) that you would advise
to ensure that all is well?

Run the defrag again in about a week, and make sure that nothing is
inhibiting the Prefetch facility from optimising layout - that needs to
have the Task scheduler enabled, and that there should be some quiet
time every three days or so for it to work in