The biggest difference between the defrag tool in Windows XP and Windows Vista is that Vista is setup to defrag all of the partitions of your hard disks automatically and on a weekly schedule by default. I suppose this was a decision by the Vista system engineers probably based on the new search feature and its constant indexing of your hard disks and the importance of keeping tidy files for faster results. If you try running a defrag manually, you will not receive any system progress or receive any visual indication of how fragmented your system partitions are. However, it is possible to manipulate the system via a command prompt to receive such information. Here's how to run the command line defragmentation utility:
To open a command prompt window, click the Windows button>> All Programs>> Accessories>> Right click the Command Prompt button and select the "Run as administrator" option. A command prompt window will now appear.
To receive information about how defragmented a certain drive is, type:
defrag c: -a -v
The "defrag" lets the system know that you would like to activate the command line defragmentation utility.
The "c:" indicates the hard disk that you would like to work in.
The "-a" indicates that you would like to perform an analysis of the C: drive.
The "-v" indicates that you require a verbose (all possible information) report.
Substitute the "c:" with any other drive that you would like to analyze.
To actually defrag a certain drive, type:
defrag c: -v -r
This option will also give you a detailed report and will defrag all files that are less than 64 MB in size. If you would like to force Vista to attempt to defrag ALL files no matter the size of the fragments, type:
defrag c: -v -w
Again, you will receive a detailed report and with the "-w" this will tell Vista to attempt to consolidate all files wherever possible.
In all cases, you will not receive a report of fragmented files of 64 MB or greater. Also, you still will not receive a progress bar during the defragmentation process. You at least now have greater flexibility over how Windows Vista is defragging your system files.
1 comment:
I don't like the Vista defragger's lack of options and the absence of a progress display.
Currently evaluating a diskeeper pro trial version (got it from www.diskeeper.com) and it has been doing a great job of maintaining my drives due to the excellent automatic defrag and low resource usage features. So far, very happy with it.
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