I have a Dell Latitude C600 that I got about three years ago, and it's a machine suitable for me, though I did have to replace the motherboard about a month ago. However, my current problem has probably nothing to do with the type of computer I have; it's an issue with my inability to use Disk Defragmenter and my pressing, pressing need to do so.

I have been messing with my computer a lot since I got to college, trying to get it to conform to the anti-virus program needs etc., and with all the moving around of programs, fragmentation has snuck up on me and my C drive is now almost entirely fragmented. My computer doesn't really run that slowly or anything -- but I have a critical problem. My computer, I believe, is SO fragmented, that it can't keep track of how much space it has on the disk. So much so that I'm losing about 10 megabytes of space every time I'm turning my computer on and off.

My C drive has 7 gigs of space. Apparently, I only have 160 megabytes left. At this point, I have pretty much NO programs BUT the operating system installed on my C drive, with my music and games on my D drive, which has no such memory-loss problems. Thus, it seems clear I should have about 6 gigs of free space on my C drive. There's practically nothing installed. I've gone through myself, cutting out whatever I can; I've run Disk Cleanup three times; nothing. And any space I get, I inevitably lose, even if I do absolutely nothing during the interim.

This is a problem in more ways than one, however, because I can't run Disk Defragmenter unless I have 15% free space available for it to use. But, unfortunately, it's been fooled into thinking I have 2% free space. The fact is, I don't even have 15% of space I can actually delete from my C drive as there's so much free space, so it seems like there's absolutely no way I can defragment my computer, and my C drive is going to spiral into oblivion and settle at 300 kilobytes free space like it did a week ago (before I found some system files I didn't need to delete). And once it gets there, my programs really like to crash.

So my question is this: Can I somehow have my computer do a scan and force it to look at all the files in my C drive, and then get an accurate depiction of how much free space I really have? If not, can I somehow run a sort of "remote disk defragmenter" to defragment the disk without needed so much free space? Because I'm going to be in trouble again soon, and, hah hah, probably won't be able to run forums again if my filespace hits 300k again...

Please, if any of you can, please help me. I would really appreciate it, because I'm afraid I'm pretty much lost as to what I could use to revise my computer's opinion of itself. Thank you very much.