Windows I've been defragging for 4 hours!!!!

Thanks for the reply Mother Gooser, Its a laptop, i will give it a whirl talking of heat, i think its heating up more than usual as well. I guess it could be due to the HDD activity.I suppose even otherwise lapops tend to heat up a lot. Its actually surprising because i thought i was a moderate user, i mean i use the system for browsing, music, movies and some light painting, designing stuff. Firstly i didnt think i would get fragmentation ( i see people claiming they havent defragged in 3 years!) and secondly, i didnt think it would cause any performance problem. But on the other hand i read up an article yday which says, its a disease and gets to every system over time since the size of files we deal with is so big. I think i better stop my essay and get troubleshooting
Thanks again.

 

The Vista Defragger defrags every single drive in your system. It takes a bloody long time.

 

That could be why then mate! lol I'll try one of the others me thinks!

On the plus side, 950GB defragged in 6 hours, woot!

 

does it?
i have defraged a few times in vista 64, by clicking on the drive i want to defrag, and it only defrags that drive!

 

I'm talking about the defrag program, not just right clicking and defragging.

 

MG

ps thats a lot of file storage M*8...............argh...hum

 

lol well....i'm greedy! Plus I have alot of stuff, every ep of every season of stargate and scrubs, and 24......and god knows what else lol

on the flip side, perfectdisk doesn't work with vista 64-bit it seems.

 

stop using windows defrag. use diskkeeper lite (or pro, if you has the cash)

 

Why put them on the hard drive since you have all those DVDs already..

 

I love diskeeper, it does the job fantastically on my computers, althogh since I switched over to Kerio firewall, it's been a tad glitchy. Seriously though, a dedicated defragging program makes sense if you've got a lot of file transfer going on, plus big partitions.

Another way to cut down on fragmentation is to partition your hard drives when you install your os, and pop each thing into it's own partition, i.e. OS + Programs in one, Documents in another, films in yet another, etc. Worked wonders for me, and makes backup simple.

 

aha ramble, I never said I had the disks...savvy?

 

Paragon Partition Manager is also pretty good on Vista.

 

At the same time? Would that mean it would try to defragment multiple partitions on the same disk at the same time? If so, that's pretty stupid.

 

I'm intrigued, how are you guys quanitifying how good a defrag programs is? Are there that many different methods for ordering data sequentially on a disk?

 

The answer is simple in that Disk Keeper, Paragon & Partition Magic allow you to define how to order the data.

The fact that the built in Windows defrag programs does not allow you to define how to order data, or to define multiple jobs amongst other things there for makes third party apps the obvious choice.

Consider that Disk Keeper, Paragon & Partition Magic all come in corporate editions, and have won multiple awards means you can be pretty sure that they are good.

 

It is annoying that there is no status screen for the vista defragger like there used to be in xp! really annoys me! you have not idea what percentage is complete!

 

Some more info:

"In Vista, this process is a lot more complicated, but yet a lot more effective. One of the changes is the shadow copy optimization during the defragmentation in a way which optimizes the system and minimizes the space used by the shadow copy. (This space is significantly large; more on this in later posts).

Also, Vista's defrag is smarter in comparison to the XP's defrag because it checks if the amount of time that would take to move files is larger than the performance benefit you gain. If the performance benefit is not too significant, it moves on to other files.

The thing most people complain about is that there is no progress bar. This is because the defragmentation in Vista is non-linear, so there is no way to estimate (correctly) how much time a defrag could possibly take. Instead of trying to show estimates of how much the defragmentation will take, the defrag team worked on a better solution: reducing the impact of defragmentation on your computer by making it use low-priority I/O and low priority CPU, so you can still use it and do what ever it is you do while the defrag is on. No more wait like in XP...

Heck, I'd rather chose not to look at it than wait 3 hours for the process to complete. That was exactly their point of view - remove it from the face of the user, and for those who never use the defrag (and there are many people like this) now they do not have to - it runs itself!

And don't worry about sluggish performance while the automatic defrag is on - it wont happen... Defrag runs only while your computer is idle."

 

Thats pretty much the opposite tact to what I'd prefer. I'd rather see a definite indication something is happening, and for it to be over as soon as possible.

 

interesting post, zr ox ... I'll be sure to remember that if/when I get Vista

 

I asked as I'm not a frequent Windows user (my work laptop runs it, but I don't have root access). I see that Diskeeper attempts to reduce fragmentation from happening which seems like a better approach to the problem. What are the different ordering options?