This section provides a brief description of disk utilities provided with Windows 98. All of the disk utilities, with the exception of DriveSpace 3, have been revised to include FAT32 support. The utilities are described in more detail later in this chapter.
Note
In general, older disk utilities that perform low-level disk functions, such as defragmenters, disk repair tools, and disk compression utilities, do not function properly on FAT32 drives. In most cases, vendors have updated their utilities to be FAT32-aware. The older versions of these utilities should continue to work properly on Windows 98 FAT16 drives.
This utility converts a hard drive from FAT16 to FAT32. After running the converter, Disk Defragmenter will run on that drive during your next boot. It is important to run Disk Defragmenter because system performance will be slow until you do. The entire process, including defragmentation, could take several hours.
Caution
Windows 98 does not include a utility for converting a drive back to FAT16 once you have converted it to FAT32.
These utilities, which you can use to partition and format disks, behave exactly as did their counterparts in MS-DOS versions 6.x and Windows 95. You can use a graphical version of Format in Windows Explorer.
The Disk Defragmenter (also called a disk optimizer) is used to defragment information on a disk. Windows 98 monitors applications that you launch and creates a log file for each application in the \Windows\Applog directory. Disk Defragmenter uses the log files to arrange program files in the order they are accessed when the program starts, causing the program to start more quickly.
The built-in support for DriveSpace 3 disk compression is completely compatible with DoubleSpaceŽ and DriveSpace 3 disk compression provided with MS-DOS 6.x and Windows 95 Plus Pack. Compression is performed by using a 32-bit virtual device driver that delivers improved performance over previously available real-mode compression drivers and frees conventional memory for use by MS-DOS-based applications when executed within Windows 98.
Note
The DriveSpace 3 program identifies FAT32 partitions but does not compress them.
This graphical disk analysis and repair tool helps users check the integrity of disks and remedy problems it detects. Users can scan files and folders, or the disk surface for errors.
Disk Cleanup offers users a list of ways to free disk space, including emptying the Recycle bin, removing old temporary files, and emptying the Internet cache. This disk space management utility is a wizard to help customers free up hard-disk space. The intent is to perform a series of typical disk space recovery tasks in a step-by-step fashion, in order to help novice users recover some disk space. The wizard is not intended to be a power-user tool and does not allow users the opportunity to delete or move system components, nor other files that could be dangerous to remove. The overriding criteria are safety and usability.
The following are the entry points for Disk Cleanup:
WinAlign is a tool designed to optimize the performance of executable code (binaries) on the Windows 98 platform. WinAlign aligns binary sections along 4 KB boundaries, aligning the executable sections with the memory pages. This allows the MapCache feature to map directly to sections in cache, resulting in a significant increase in performance through more available memory.
For more information about WinAlign, see the Windows 98 Resource Kit Tools Help.