Fern wrote:

The system is so very slow to load and get ready for me to work.
Does that mean a defrag is needed or something else ?

These would be my priorities, most important first.

1) Do you have a recent backup image made of the hard drive ?
What if the drive stopped working ?
What would you do ?

This is an example of a free backup program.
You store the backup image on a USB connected hard drive,
network attached storage (NAS), file sharing on a second computer,
and so on. You do *not* store the backup image on
the same drive that you suspect is "sick".

There are at least 20 programs that do backups. Several
brands provide free versions (which do the all-important
"basic" "save my ass" kind of backup). You can pay money
to add various kinds of automation to the backups, but that's
not necessary when you need to make one backup now, before it
is too late.

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

2) Once the backup is made, of all the partitions on the
hard drive, you can play a bit.

http://www.hdtune.com/download.html

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

The Health tab shows the hard drive internally-maintained
S.M.A.R.T statistics.

The Benchmark curve is a more sensitive test of drive performance.
If there was, say, a 50GB wide swath of disk surface responding
at only 10MB/sec, that would tell you that you need a new drive.
The little spikes in my captured traces in this picture, are
nothing to worry about. Note as well, there are some "yellow"
marks in the Health screen, and you can ignore those, as the
yellow bits happen on brand new drives to, and are a cosmetic
issue with this ten year old program.

https://i.postimg.cc/nc7w0Chr/HDTune-ST3500418-AS.gif

3) Now that we got the important stuff done, we can dream
about defragmentation.

The Windows built-in defrag has an "Analyze" button, which
does a perfectly fine analysis of drive fragmentation level.
You can use this as part of your investigation.

In File Explorer, right click the C: drive and select Properties,
then Tools, then Defragment Now. The drive you selected when
doing the Properties ( C: ) will be highlighted. Click the Analyze
button, but be prepared to wait a couple minutes if the fragmentation
is bad.

*******

The defragmenter on WinXP was written by President Software. It's
a fine defragmenter, in that it "packs the blocks to the left" of
the screen, like a hero. What it doesn't do, is any "white space"
defragmentation.

When a software has this defect, after the defragmentation run is
completed, new fragmentation happens faster than if the drive content
were "laid out fresh" via things like a Restore with your backup software.

So while you can click the Defragment button, and wait 8 to 16 hours
for it to complete, the results may not have any really long-lasting
effects.

Once you've got the results of the "Analyze" button from the
built-in defragmenter, you can post back your results, and we
can talk further about fixes. I think the build-in defragmenter
can help, but the time to completion is pretty long. Also, if this
is a laptop, you'll want to leave it plugged in, in case the
defrag takes 16 hours or something.

My guess is, something is the matter with the drive, and the results
of (2) will outclass anything you're seeing in (3).

Paul

Paul in Houston TX wrote:
Fern wrote:

Is there a tool that will allow this?

I have a Windows XP Pro laptop.

Doing it that way would leave the drive fragmented making defrag a waste
of time.