Protools fragmenting files small and large

[Dr. Bockman]

Protools LE (002r) seems to be fragmenting every file that I save to my external Seagate firewire drive. Whether it's a small .pts file or a large audio file, every time I save and follow it up by analyzing the hard drive for fragmentation, the files are fragmented. I discovered this while having some serious problems just getting Protools to run smoothly. When I try to open a session where the .pts or any of the audio files are fragmented, Protools slows to a halt. At best, I get buffer under/over flows.

Dell Inspiron 8200 Laptop 1.6 GhZ P4
512 RAM
Protools LE 6.4
Digi 002r
30 G internal system drive
150 G external Seagate Firewire drive


I have been running Protools LE (now updated to 6.4) on my Dell Inspiron laptop for about 2 1/2 years now. Not until recently did this start happening. The 150 Gig Seagate drive is brand new, and I have only used up about 13 Gig.

Another thing I noticed (but may be unrelated) is that whenver I close Protools, there is a series of exception notices that fire off, each of which I have to hit ok on to finish closing Protools. Each error notice regards memory that could not be read from location ... 4ea4dd8d or something similar.

I have unistalled Protools and reinstalled. The errors upon closing do not occur on Protools LE 6.1, but start to occur again when I upgrade to 6.4.

At this point I realize that it could be my decrepid WinXP system. I am still able to have fairly smooth sessions and record 10 tracks at a time (8 analog and 2 spdif) but I have to defragment my hard drive every day and sometimes multiple times per day. It takes time and I am worried that it will take its toll on the hard drive.

I have searched the DUC, answerbase and googled, but haven't found anything yet. It may be that I haven't found the right words to search with, but I figured that if anyone knew anything about this, someone on this forum would.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Wil Reeves