Welcome to Vista Banter. You are currently viewing our boards as a guest which gives you limited access to view most discussions, articles and access our other FREE features. By joining our free community you will have access to ask questions and reply to others posts, upload your own photos and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free so please, join our community today! If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact contact support. |
|
Hardware and Windows Vista Hardware issues in relation to Windows Vista. (microsoft.public.windows.vista.hardware_devices) |
|
LinkBack | Thread Tools | Display Modes |
|
|||
Defrag
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. |
|
|||
Defrag
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. |
|
|||
Defrag
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 |
|
|||
Defrag
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 |