Defragmenting Vista

[Replicant]

At the moment I go into a Command Prompt (as Admin) and type defrag c: -a which tells me if I need to defrag the volume. Why on earth MS removed the GUI feature I will never know as it doesnt tell you if you need to defrag or not.

Any recommendations as to a free/cheap Vista defag utility as the built in version doesnt tell you anything at all.

[BinnsY]

Diskeeper is lovely, unfortunately its only a 30 day trial but will get the job done.

[robbo]

Auslogics Disk Defrag

http://www.download.com/Auslogics-Disk- ... 67503.html

Quite good apparently. Not used it yet but had it bookmarked after reading about it.

edit - it's free btw

[SmileyMan]

Heh heh - you do know that defragmenting is a complete waste of time nowadays? ** It's just there as a tool for tech support people to get rid of you for an hour or so!

Start -> Computer -> <right-click HDD> -> Properties -> Tools -> Defragment Now

There's the option there to schedule it too. In fact, it's probably set up by default to Wednesdays at 01:00.



** OK, to be less glib, there are two reasons why fragmentation isn't a problem. Firstly, NT-based operating systems are almost always using NTFS formatted disks. NTFS has a virtually flat response to file and folder fragmentation****; no matter how fragmented the drive is, the speed is hardly affected at all. The second reason is that with a multi-tasking operating system, by definition many programs are trying to access the disk at once, so unless you run a very small number of background tasks, you're not helping yourself. All modern disk drivers automatically re-order the incoming requests to minimise head travel times and thus maximise performance.

**** There IS an NTFS issue with fragmentation, which is when the Master File Table (MFT) gets fragmented. This can happen if you fill up the usable space on a disk, and the disk is heavily fragmented at the time. Normally, you should try to use no more than 95% of a disk's capacity, but in case some runaway program fills up the space, it is worth having the disk defragmented at the time to help prevent MFT fragmentation from happening; hence the default MS weekly schedule. However, it's also worth noting that if you DO end up with MFT fragmentation, then there's currently nothing you can do about it other than backup, reformat and restore.

[Replicant]

Diskeeper is lovely, unfortunately its only a 30 day trial but will get the job done.

I dont like to use a product that is manufactured by a company that forces its employees to learn Scientology!!

i found a better solution and went back to using Linux.

[BinnsY]

Rofl never realised that, its still a good program though

[Replicant]

Evil bunch of **** if you ask me - I greatly dislike their insidious nature.