I've heard reasons why they dumbed down the new Defrag tool, but here's one
excellent reason why any feedback at all would help.

When I run the tool manually that stupid circle rotates and there's a
message saying it could take a few minutes to a few hours. Well, unless I
shut down the program it runs for days on end. Clearly if it was running
everyday at 4 AM it wouldn't take that long to defrag any of my drives, and
since there's no feedback, I have no idea whether it's actually doing
anything at all.

S Murder,

There are several conditions that could cause your defrag to run forever,
but it's sometimes hard to identify the problem off hand. Here are a couple
things you can try to see whether those help rectify the situation:

1. Before running defrag, run scandisk (now called Error-checking)
2. Run defrag in safe mode

If you aren't using a good disk cleaning program, here is a free disk
cleaning program called Ccleaner, that does a great job:

http://ccleaner.com/

Download and run it using the default settings. I use it all the time.

Here's a free program that provides a graphical picture of what's on your
hard drive. I was surprised when it showed that I had several large crash
dump files taking up a lot of hard drive space:

http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/faq.php

The download link is on the left. This program is very useful.

Here is a link to after market defrag programs, complete with a graphical
user interface. These are mostly shareware, some expensive and some very
reasonable, but I suppose you can find free defraggers out the

http://www.bestvistadownloads.com/do...-software.html

They say that there is more than one way to skin a cat.

--
freddy


"S Murder" wrote:

I've heard reasons why they dumbed down the new Defrag tool, but here's one
excellent reason why any feedback at all would help.

When I run the tool manually that stupid circle rotates and there's a
message saying it could take a few minutes to a few hours. Well, unless I
shut down the program it runs for days on end. Clearly if it was running
everyday at 4 AM it wouldn't take that long to defrag any of my drives, and
since there's no feedback, I have no idea whether it's actually doing
anything at all.

In my case turned out I had a partition that was nearly full (my old XP
installation) that Vista just couldn't defrag. Despite turning off
automatic defragging and launching from the C drive's properties page,
the analysis would keep saying I needed to defrag again. Once I deleted
the old partition it finally stopped this annoying behavior and I could
enabled auto-defrag again.


--
Crito

Yeah, unfortunately Vista's defrag isnt the most informative tool, but
it is less resource intensive than the old XP defragger used to be.

As Freddy suggested, there are payware programs that give you better
GUI control and progress indicators. Again, his suggestion to clean up
the junk from the drive using ccleaner is excellent. I always run
ccleaner before a manual defrag job.

Of the payware programs, I personally like Diskeeper because its a good
defragger with both manual and automatic modes. You can download the
trial professional version (free for 30 days) from the link in the post
above, or from the Diskeeper website itself and run it. It ought to do a
much quicker defrag job than Vista's own tool.

S Murder;616753 Wrote:
I've heard reasons why they dumbed down the new Defrag tool, but here's
one
excellent reason why any feedback at all would help.

When I run the tool manually that stupid circle rotates and there's a
message saying it could take a few minutes to a few hours. Well, unless
I
shut down the program it runs for days on end. Clearly if it was
running
everyday at 4 AM it wouldn't take that long to defrag any of my drives,
and
since there's no feedback, I have no idea whether it's actually doing
anything at all.


--
Achilles