Only Microsoft can make a small utility worse.

[capsulecorpjx]

The Defrag for Windows XP works very well, and usually finishes within a few hours.

I tried to run Vista Home 64's defrag. There is no status bar, no analysis information. But the worst part is that it doesn't work, and it never finishes.

I've run this stupid thing for 24 hours + before finally cancelling in frustration.

Then I read on the internet that Vista Defrag uses a new algorithm.

The XP Defrag algorithm will join an entire defragged file and puts it in one continuous location on disk.

ista defrag only defrags 64 megabyte chunks, on the idea that anything beyond that is inconsequential in I/O speed, and that it won't need the as much HD freespace to perform the defrag.

But I think the Vista Defrag's 64 meg chunk approach is flawed, since it's forcing a check on EVERY SINGLE 64 megabyte block of every file.

This makes this stupid thing run forever, and in the end, it's not even defragging the files as good as Defrag XP. The results is a 24 hour + run, with files still fragmented in 64 meg chunks.

[kleinma]

Well considering you know better than the team of file system engineers who designed everything, and that you live in Washington, why not head to Redmond with the one you wrote that works better and let them have a look

[EntityX]

I have Vista Business but it's not the 64 bit version. I'm doing a defrag now. There's no progress bar like you said which isn't good. I'll find out how long it takes. I have 4 sectors on my hard drive. One is XP another is Vista and 2 sectors are blank waiting for future OSs. I'm just defragging the 88 GB sector that has Vista on it and has 42 GB free. It says "this may take from a few minutes to a few hours."

[capsulecorpjx]

I have Vista Business but it's not the 64 bit version. I'm doing a defrag now. There's no progress bar like you said which isn't good. I'll find out how long it takes. I have 4 sectors on my hard drive. One is XP another is Vista and 2 sectors are blank waiting for future OSs. I'm just defragging the 88 GB sector that has Vista on it and has 42 GB free. It says "this may take from a few minutes to a few hours."

Let me know how long it takes to defrag that.

I had a 250 gb drive, and it wasn't defragged after 24 hours. There was around 40 gigs free.

[kregg]

Have you tried this? (MyDefrag, formerly known as JKDefrag)

[penagate]

Matt, suppose you've just traded in your fridge for a model which is advertised to be better and more efficient. Your turn it on and leave it overnight, but when you come back to it in the morning your milk's gone sour. You suggest the thermostat is broken. Which response would you rather hear?

— "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. We'll send someone out to take a look."

Or...

— "Thermostat, eh? Well buddy, since you know so much about fridges, why don't you build a better one yourself!"


I might forgive the latter response from an OSS vendor, assuming I hadn't paid them for support, but it'd certainly be a turn-off.

What makes you think it'd be acceptable from Microsoft?

[EntityX]

It took 2 hours 40 min or less to defrag 46 GB.

I was wondering if you have your computer set up for multi boot with different OSs on different sectors it wouldn't cause any kind of problem to have your XP defragger defrag your Vista sector would it? or vice versa. I suppose I could have used my XP defragger to defrag my Vista sector and that way I would have had a progress bar.

[mendhak]

The Defrag for Windows XP works very well, and usually finishes within a few hours.

I tried to run Vista Home 64's defrag. There is no status bar, no analysis information. But the worst part is that it doesn't work, and it never finishes.

I've run this stupid thing for 24 hours + before finally cancelling in frustration.

Then I read on the internet that Vista Defrag uses a new algorithm.

The XP Defrag algorithm will join an entire defragged file and puts it in one continuous location on disk.

ista defrag only defrags 64 megabyte chunks, on the idea that anything beyond that is inconsequential in I/O speed, and that it won't need the as much HD freespace to perform the defrag.

But I think the Vista Defrag's 64 meg chunk approach is flawed, since it's forcing a check on EVERY SINGLE 64 megabyte block of every file.

This makes this stupid thing run forever, and in the end, it's not even defragging the files as good as Defrag XP. The results is a 24 hour + run, with files still fragmented in 64 meg chunks.

You've got some process writing to disk which is interrupting the defrag, causing it to restart. Stop some of the services, or as many as you can.

I have a 1TB HD, I usually leave it defragging overnight.

[Nightwalker83]

I'm defraging my pc (Vista Ultimate) it says this may take a few hours! What? How can you tell its actually working? Sure the busy symbol appears and the cancel button is enabled but there is no indication that the computer is being scanned.

Edit:

Let me know how long it takes to defrag that.

I had a 250 gb drive, and it wasn't defragged after 24 hours. There was around 40 gigs free.

Well in that case I am stuffed! My pc "C:\" is a terabyte and the "D:\" is just under 75GB in size.

"C:\" has 240GB used and "D:\" has 8GB used.

[storm5510]

The defrag utility on XP is a very scaled down version of something the creators of Diskeeper produced. I always felt the XP version lacked basic functions. I don't use it. I use one by a company called AusLogics. It does a great job and it is fast! I have no patience for long process. There's no way I would tolerate a defrag operation that took hours and hours to complete.

[Nightwalker83]

Just read if you run the Vista defrag program from the command prompt it will display an output of what is happening:

http://www.kongtechnology.com/2008/0...windows-vista/

Edit:

Just finished defraging the pc with Auslogics and it only took 16 minutes to finish both drives. Vista defrag is still going. I think MS forgot to implement the defrag part so all you get is the interface.

[kleinma]

Matt, suppose you've just traded in your fridge for a model which is advertised to be better and more efficient. Your turn it on and leave it overnight, but when you come back to it in the morning your milk's gone sour. You suggest the thermostat is broken. Which response would you rather hear?

— "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. We'll send someone out to take a look."

Or...

— "Thermostat, eh? Well buddy, since you know so much about fridges, why don't you build a better one yourself!"


I might forgive the latter response from an OSS vendor, assuming I hadn't paid them for support, but it'd certainly be a turn-off.

What makes you think it'd be acceptable from Microsoft?

The reason I find it acceptable is because I have no issue with the defrag in Vista or Windows 7. In fact, I never run it. Do you like to sit there and stare at a meaningless bar of blue and red, making your mind think your computer just got a massive hardware upgrade because the red sections are now blue?

The defrag in Vista is designed to run in the background. Do you sit there and watch your virus scanner run through every file on your system? This is a system level utility which I don't want to know or care about.. I have better things to do like write software.

My comments are just that I don't think capsulecorpjx, or you, or myself is an expert on NTFS and hard disk fragmentation of the file system. So my apologies in advance if I am wrong at that. So I trust the experts on it, who built the system.

Here is a good read, which will answer/counter most of the questions/arguments about the defrag.

As for why it takes so long, it is SUPPOSED TO... it runs with super low IO and CPU resources because it is designed for background operation so that your computer doesn't get bogged down at all, again, because it isn't supposed to be something for you to be concerned about as the user.

[capsulecorpjx]

The reason I find it acceptable is because I have no issue with the defrag in Vista or Windows 7. In fact, I never run it. Do you like to sit there and stare at a meaningless bar of blue and red, making your mind think your computer just got a massive hardware upgrade because the red sections are now blue?

The defrag in Vista is designed to run in the background. Do you sit there and watch your virus scanner run through every file on your system? This is a system level utility which I don't want to know or care about.. I have better things to do like write software.

My comments are just that I don't think capsulecorpjx, or you, or myself is an expert on NTFS and hard disk fragmentation of the file system. So my apologies in advance if I am wrong at that. So I trust the experts on it, who built the system.

Here is a good read, which will answer/counter most of the questions/arguments about the defrag.

As for why it takes so long, it is SUPPOSED TO... it runs with super low IO and CPU resources because it is designed for background operation so that your computer doesn't get bogged down at all, again, because it isn't supposed to be something for you to be concerned about as the user.

First rule of good user programming is always provide status, the user will not think the thing is in some infinite loop or hung forever.

Second rule is, don't run a program with the lowest possible priority without at least telling hte user, or giving the user the option to run it at a higher priority. Having Defrag running at low priority over many days doesn't even make sense, that means you're letting the user fragment the disk with use, WHILE the utility is trying to defrag it.

Also, not everyone leaves their computer on days in a row, which seems to be what MS Defrag need to actually do the defragging.

[Campion]

I was wondering if you have your computer set up for multi boot with different OSs on different sectors

Not to nit-pick, but the word you want here is partition. Sectors are small, ranging in size from 512K to a few megabytes.

[EntityX]

Thanks for that clarification.

I wonder if some of you guys really need to have as much on your drives as you do. They say the more you make the more you spend. I think there's a similar principle with storage. You can now get such an enormous amount of storage capacity with hard drives for not too much money so people tend to fill it up.

[kleinma]

First rule of good user programming is always provide status, the user will not think the thing is in some infinite loop or hung forever.

Second rule is, don't run a program with the lowest possible priority without at least telling hte user, or giving the user the option to run it at a higher priority. Having Defrag running at low priority over many days doesn't even make sense, that means you're letting the user fragment the disk with use, WHILE the utility is trying to defrag it.

Also, not everyone leaves their computer on days in a row, which seems to be what MS Defrag need to actually do the defragging.

Defrag is meant to be a service of the operating system. Not a client application. It isn't supposed to be run manually by the user, it is supposed to run when scheduled without you even having to worry about it. If you want status, run the command line utility.

As the article I linked to said anyway, most of the visual data in the defrag UI was never accurate anyway, never provided accurate progress, so what is the point of looking at an inaccurate UI?

[penagate]

Good article. But it doesn't explain one thing: Why is there a (graphical) client utility if it's not meant to be launched by the user?

Having the CLI is understandable, but people are used to launching the GUI to manually run a defrag, since there used not to be a service for it. I should think it would make more sense to remove the GUI and leave only the CLI and service.


(Genuinely curious, not arguing for the sake of it.)

[storm5510]

Just finished defraging the pc with Auslogics and it only took 16 minutes to finish both drives. Vista defrag is still going. I think MS forgot to implement the defrag part so all you get is the interface.

Reminds me of a gag program I wrote back in the DOS days. It was a fake hard drive format. All the text was exact and in the proper places and a loop to increment the numbers. I put it on an instructors computer at the college I went to. The instructor nearly filled his pants when he saw that. Everyone in the class knew about it so it was hard to keep straight faces.

[wossname]

Reminds me of a gag program I wrote back in the DOS days. It was a fake hard drive format. All the text was exact and in the proper places and a loop to increment the numbers. I put it on an instructors computer at the college I went to. The instructor nearly filled his pants when he saw that. Everyone in the class knew about it so it was hard to keep straight faces.

Oh, you zany kids!

[storm5510]

It was one of a very few computers at the college that actually had a hard drive. 80286 CPU with a 20 MB hard drive. That was a hot-rod in those days, (late 80's). Most everything else were IBM PC's with those big noisy floppy drives using 5 1/4" discs.

[Campion]

Most everything else were IBM PC's with those big noisy floppy drives using 5 1/4" discs.

I don't care what people say. The PCjr was a fun little machine.

[BillGeek]

I wonder if some of you guys really need to have as much on your drives as you do. They say the more you make the more you spend. I think there's a similar principle with storage. You can now get such an enormous amount of storage capacity with hard drives for not too much money so people tend to fill it up.

Well, back in the day of Win 95, having music on your computer was unheard of. If you had music, it was either on a disc or tape casette. Movies were on VHS and Games took about 40MB hard drive space each.

Nowadays EVERYONE has some form of music on their computers. They might have a couple of movies stored somewhere and then there are games

If I break down my hard drive usage, it looks something like this:
Games - Around 60GB (Dead Space, Mass Effect, Doom 3, Sims 3, C&C 3, GTA Vice city... a couple more but can't remember)
Music - Around 80GB
Movies - Around 120GB (TV shows, DVD's, VideoCam recordings, etc...)

So in total for just the three categories mentioned, I'm using around 81% of my (320GB) harddrive space WITHOUT taking into account the OS, (standard XP SP2 is probably around 3 to 4 GB) installed Software, (office 2007 takes up an insane amount of space compared to 2003) documents, pictures, etc...

It's understandable, but probably not excusable, eh?

[kleinma]

I have just over 700 movies in original MPEG2 format, on my WHS

They take up a few TB.

[capsulecorpjx]

Well, back in the day of Win 95, having music on your computer was unheard of. If you had music, it was either on a disc or tape casette. Movies were on VHS and Games took about 40MB hard drive space each.

Nowadays EVERYONE has some form of music on their computers. They might have a couple of movies stored somewhere and then there are games

If I break down my hard drive usage, it looks something like this:
Games - Around 60GB (Dead Space, Mass Effect, Doom 3, Sims 3, C&C 3, GTA Vice city... a couple more but can't remember)
Music - Around 80GB
Movies - Around 120GB (TV shows, DVD's, VideoCam recordings, etc...)

So in total for just the three categories mentioned, I'm using around 81% of my (320GB) harddrive space WITHOUT taking into account the OS, (standard XP SP2 is probably around 3 to 4 GB) installed Software, (office 2007 takes up an insane amount of space compared to 2003) documents, pictures, etc...

It's understandable, but probably not excusable, eh?

You forgot porn.

[BillGeek]

Oh yeah. THAT would explain the missing 60GB... ... ...

I have just over 700 movies in original MPEG2 format, on my WHS

They take up a few TB.

Jeez... do you ever get to watch them? Or rather: Have you actually watched all of them?

[kleinma]

Since the movies are on my windows home server, I have access to them from either of my TVs (via xbox 360s) or from my laptop, or from my main computer.

So usually I will throw on a random movie when I am doing other stuff, like working on code. Beats having TV on with commercials.

There are a few I have not seen in their entirety, but I have been trying to make sure I watch every one, and delete anything I don't care to have anymore. I am trying to make the collection more about quality than quantity.

[chris128]

I am trying to make the collection more about quality than quantity.

+

I have just over 700 movies in original MPEG2 format, on my WHS

They take up a few TB.

=

[kleinma]

are you trying to say there can not be 700 quality movies?

[chris128]

Pretty much yeah

[kleinma]

Well you are young. Perhaps you don't appreciate the awesome (and horrible at the same time) movies that came out of the 80s.

[chris128]

This is true, I didnt realise movies had been invented back then

[MaximilianMayrhofer]

The absolute best defragger i've ever come across is made by Auslogics. The Auslogics Boostspeed suite is one of the few pieces of software online that I am willing to pay good money for.

[mendhak]

You're all noobs. I've fine tuned my computer usage habits in such a way that everything I do is contiguous on disk. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to play World of Warcraft - it's on the next sector.

[chris128]

You're all noobs. I've fine tuned my computer usage habits in such a way that everything I do is contiguous on disk. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to play World of Warcraft - it's on the next sector.

haha I wish I could rate that post

[kleinma]

You're all noobs. I've fine tuned my computer usage habits in such a way that everything I do is contiguous on disk. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to play World of Warcraft - it's on the next sector.

which happens to also be the BAD sector

[EntityX]

If you never ever defragged your hard drive and did all kinds of things that really made things get all fragged up how great of an evil would that be. Would your computer really run that much slower. Maybe some studies on this have been done.

[Black Zero]

It's indeed slower. One of my clients said that his laptop had been so slow. I checked it and found out he hadn't run any maintenance utility for well over a year. I installed both mydefrag and ccleaner, ran ccleaner first and mydefrag second.

After few hours running these two utilites, and restarted the computer, I told him to give it a try. I went out for a drink shortly.

He then said fifteen minutes later to me, 'that's great, now it's faster than EVER!'

So yeah, even common people say maintenance utilities are good, so we should too! xD

[EntityX]

I wonder if they'll develop software that prevents your hard drive from getting fragmented in the first place. So if you had a defragmented hard drive you could use it for months and the need to defrag it would never arise because it would remain defragged. There's probably a logical reason why this wouldn't work but perhaps there's a way around it that no one has ever thought of.

[kleinma]

SSD drives do not need to be degragged. In fact they recommend against it.

[Campion]

SSD drives do not need to be degragged. In fact they recommend against it.

I've read the same as well. The random read times are MUCH less with SSD's than standard HD's, especially since they don't have to seek a spinning disk.

On top of that, I can load Doom II in 0.35 seconds! Much better than the 5 minutes it took on my old 486.


(And just to note for the Grammar police, the use of the apostrophes above is perfectly legal, as I am using them to pluralize acronyms.)