Windows Vista Defrag - can I get an old version back??

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ahmad

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Topic # 18266 4-Jan-2008 10:34

Who decided that the new Windows Defrag should not show any progress/details during scan?

"This scan could take a few minutes to a few hours"?

Endless halo thingy spinning around?

How can I get the old one back that showed me how defragged the disk was, and allowed me to choose whether or not to defrag (and even suggested if I didn't need to perform it?).

I just did 2 back to back and not only did it actually do something on the 2nd time around, it took a lot of time to do it! I recall previously that it didn't take very long to defrag a drive having just defragged it a second prior...

chiefie

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Reply # 102870 4-Jan-2008 11:28

Why not try Auslogics Disk Defrag? It's free and I use it on all Windows here at home, XP/Vista/2003 and works fine and fast too.

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ahmad

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Reply # 102877 4-Jan-2008 11:39

Wow. There seem to be some hidden free gems out there that aren't commonly known about. Like this.

What's the Registry Defrag like? Required or not?

Hmm...why doesn't the Firefox in-line spell check work in the geekzone compose reply?

chakkaradeep

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Reply # 102879 4-Jan-2008 11:41

I have left the defrag of drives to the default vista settings and never bothered about it. It just runs on it scheduled time and since I have 2 GB of RAM, I havent even felt that its running. And also the default time it scheduled is at 1 A.M every wednesday which is very convenient. The current status shows the last run and also the next scheduled run. I havent spend much time in checking whether this drive is defraged or not...but yes, there is no option to set which drives to be defragmented. This is added in the Service Pack 1 where you can select which drives to be defragmented. I really wouldnt need a graphical display of whats happening as again thats going to take more resources. But on the other hand, if the defragment fails, Windows Vista should log it in the Event Log. You can use the Event Viewer to look into it. This Event Viewer, I found to be really good and better than Windows XP and most of the things (Windows messages/errors/success) is written there.

But that being said, Windows Vista Home Basic is seriously the very basic version and not sure what is possible and not. I sometimes think why Microsoft has that version! If you ask me, I would say,

1) Rename Windows Vista Business to Windows Home Premium
2) Rename Windows Vista Enterprise to Windows Vista Business
3) Windows Vista Ultimate - good name

4) Remove Windows Vista Home Basic

Regards,
Chaks

Desktop : Intel Quad Core Q9400 2.66GHz - 8GB RAM - 500 GB + 500 GB HDD - NVidia GeForce 9800GT - LG246WH Flatron Display - Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise with Hyper-V
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chakkaradeep

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Reply # 102880 4-Jan-2008 11:43

ahmad:
What's the Registry Defrag like? Required or not?

Eventhough there are registry cleaners/defrag, please use it on your own risk. They have the high risk of putting your system down and with Vista, am sure that is going to happen if you use it, today or tomorrow

carlsberg

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Reply # 103489 8-Jan-2008 04:58

Vista's defrag is automatic, which is quite sophisticated and cool. It means that you dont need to waste time defragging drives manually or setting up schedules for late nights, yet the OS keeps the drives optimized automatically in the background. Really efficient and useful if you have a large number of drives or administer a large number of PCs, which would otherwise take up a lot of your time.

The downside is that Vista offers no control over the defrag such as exclusion lists, defrag modes, progress etc. But there are commerical defragmenters available, if one is so inclined that provide automatic defrag as well as comprehensive control. These are not free ofcourse, but quite useful in corporate environments.

As for registry optimizers, they are anything but. In my misguided (lol), tweak-happy days, I tried some of the more 'popular' registry optimizers. They were nothing but trouble. Keep these things far away from your system.