That is a somewhat misleading error message.  The actual cause of that
problem is with your 17 gb hard drive.   Somehow, probably because a
disk cloning utility was used to copy the contents of a smaller hard
drive to it, the drive has been created using a cluster size of 4kb.
This results in more than 4.1 million total clusters on the drive and
both scandisk and defrag are not capable of functioning on drives that
have that many clusters.  

It appears that these programs (scandisk and defrag) attempt to create
a table in RAM that contains an entry for each cluster on the drive
and when there are more than 4.1 million clusters total the table size
exceeds the capacity of the program.

If you open an MS-DOS prompt window and enter the following command:

CHKDSK C:

It will tell you how many total allocation units (= clusters) there
are on the drive and how many bytes (probably 4096 in your case) there
are in each allocation unit.

The only ways to overcome this problem are to:
1.  Use a utility such as Partition Magic (Symantec) or BootItNG
(www.bootitng.com) to increase the cluster size of the hard drive to
8kb (8192 bytes).  This can be a bit risky as any interruption or
failure during the change could result in the loss of the entire
contents of the drive.
2.  Reformat the hard drive and then restore everything from backups.

Good luck

Ron Martell     Duncan B.C.    Canada

Where are you seeing this 33% and 53% performance figure?  I suspect that
this is not measuring performance at all, and that changes you make to
increase this figure might not help. For instance, you can usually force
these measures higher by doing without your virus protection, but that isn't
a good idea if you are using the machine on-line.

If the percentage figures you mention refer to "resources", they are
fixed and dependant on neither free memory nor HD space (nor icons).
The figures you quoted should pose no problems.  For example, my User is
at 27% at the moment, GDI is 57%.

The only way to increase resources is to close running programs.  I
suspect you have many things that start up automatically when you boot
and suggest that you cull those startup programs...preferably via the
programs' options but if those are not available you can do so via
Start-Run-msconfig-Startup tab.

--
dadiOH
____________________________

dadiOH's dandies v3.06...
...a help file of info about MP3s, recording from
LP/cassette and tips & tricks on this and that.
Get it at http://mysite.verizon.net/xico

I assume you are looking at the value of Free System Resources as
reported in Control Panel - System - Performance.

If so then start with http://www.onlinehelp.bc.ca/tips.htm#resources
and also http://www.aumha.org/win4/a/resource.htm for information
about system resources.

One of the best ways to improve the value of free System Resources is
to reduce the number of background "tools and toys" (a.k.a. crap and
corruption) that gets loaded when the computer starts up. Use Start -
Run - MSCONFIG and go to the Startup tab.  Compare the list of items
that are loading at startup with the following checklist web sites to
see what can be safely dispensed with:

http://www2.whidbey.com/djdenham/Uncheck.htm
http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_content.php
http://www.3feetunder.com/krick/startup/list.html - has trojan related
items listed

Note:  Please ensure that you fully understand the purpose of a
startup item, how and why it was put into the startup, and the
consequences (if any) of removing it before you make any changes.
Some items are very important for the proper and safe functioning of
your computer, including at least one item that is listed twice.

Disabling an item by unchecking it in MSCONFIG should only be done for
testing purposes or as a "last resort" when no other way of getting
rid of the unwanted item can be found.

Good luck

Ron Martell     Duncan B.C.    Canada

Scandisk and Defrag don't work on my Win98 SE computer either. I use Disk
Doctor instead of Scandisk. Disk Doctor is part of Symantec's System Works 5.
I use Diskeeper version 7 from Executive Software to Defrag my drives. total
cost of the two is about $100
You should be able to find both of these older versions a little cheaper
online by now.
I know this comes 14 days after your post, sorry.     best of  luck, Robb N.
Cravens