Speeding up Defrag

[D A Nowakow]

I am running XP on a custom built machine with 256mb of
SDRAM and a P3 500mhz cpu. I have two WD 40GB drives
divided into two partitions each. I'm using NTFS file
system instead of FAT32.
The problem has to do with defraging the hard drives. It
takes forever. I have XP on the first partition of drive
C (10gb used with 8.5gb free 18.5 total space). It can
take up to three hours to defrag this partition us the Ms
app. I have had the same results using SpeedDisk from
Norton.
Is there anyway to speed up the process. When I run the
defrag app I unload evrything except the Ms processes.
Would reformating my prime Hard drive and using FAT 32
instead of NTFS help??

 

[David Jones]

This is basically normal. Defragmentation can take a
LONG time depending on how fragmented the drive is, the
amount of RAM on the system, the speed of the hard
drives, and the computer in general (not always in that
exact order).