Windows Vista Defragging Question(s)

I just bought a used Compaq Presario C700 laptop that has Vista Home Premium installed, and shows about 30% of the primary partition used. There is an 8 gig recovery partition, and the primary is somewhere near 115gigs in total size. System ram is 1gig. The processor is a duo core 1.46ghz.
I've tried running the native defrag program, and, no matter how long I let it run, it never finishes. By now, I've probably run it for a total of 3 hours(not continuously), if not more. I have a desktop with Vista, another that has Vista and XP in dual boot, and two more laptops with XP.
I have a program called Defraggler by Piriform running on all of them. It runs fine on all of these machines, except for this Compaq laptop. It installed ok. When I ran analyze, it showed a considerable number(over 1500 files) fragmented. Then, when I select defrag, it immediately shows "defrag failed ".
I uninstalled it and gave the native defrag program another shot. I started it, went and ate dinner, came back, and it was still running. As I mentioned, I ran it for a considerable amount of time, in intervals, and it never finished.
This morning, I reinstalled Defraggler, analyzed the drive, and it showed only 15 fragmented files. Trying to defrag still shows immediate failure.
I then uninstalled it again, and ran the native defragger again, thinking that I just wasn't patient enough before. After about 45 minutes, it still hadn't stopped or showed any indication of completion.
Is thee a way of running the native defrag program and have it show some sort of "progress" indicator like in XP?

 

I'll just quote this from one of my other replies:

Watch the HDD LED, if it stops flashing or stays on without flashing, the defragmenter may have crashed.

Different defragmenters arrange the files on the drive differently, so if you keep swapping, they may be rearranging the all the files constantly. Choose one and keep using that. Set it up to run overnight and see if it completes.

Matt

 

I did run the checkdisk with fix file system errors and check for bad sectors. The drive is ok.
I'll give the native defragger another shot from the command prompt, and post what results back here-probably tomorrow.
Thanks for your replies, Mattman and Arie. I appreciate it.

 

Good news. Running the defragger from the command prompt with administrative privileges and the -v option resulted in a completed "verbose" defrag. I'm satisfied that the routine ran to completion.
Thanks again.
I truly appreciate you guys.