Hi ms1033, Are you running low on disk space? if so, it would be a good idea to run a disk cleanup first bfore you defrag, did you defrag in safe mode? If some program was running while the defragmenter worked its possible it got interrupted. Also if your drive tends to get fragmented fast ( i agree with you when u say the sheer number of updates and patches we download nowadays can contribute to this) it would be good to defrag more often, or you can set some automatic tool on the job. Insufficient memory can be another reason. If you boot is slow, you cud try deleting pretetch. http://www.tw