We hear this concern a lot in the newsgroups. I think with XP we did a
good job of training people to sit and watch the defrag run, because the
computer was pretty much unusable during defragmentation and your only
choices were to watch it run or go do something else. My own personal
method was to wait for my system to become sluggish, add a reminder to
Outlook for 5pm on a weekday, start defrag, and then go home. Not exactly
an elegant solution
With Vista, we designed the defrag to run once a week at night to keep
your computer in a relatively defragmented state. For end users who don't
come to newsgroups and don't know the first thing about file systems, the
defragger runs without their knowledge and keeps their computers
defragmented. This is a giant leap from XP. But, even if you know about
fragmentation and decide to run the defragger manually, the computer is
still usable--the defragger is designed so that you can still do other
things on the computer, which eliminates the need for a countdown (aka
progress indicator) to let you know when the computer is usable. We would
like for customers to think of defrag as a system process that runs when
it can and that doesn't interfere with your work. In other words, if you
want your system to be defragmented but don't really care when or how,
let the defragger do its thing. Savvy users who want very fine control
over defragmentation tend to prefer 3rd-party defraggers, many of which
have been recommended here. These will give you the progress and
graphical views you're looking for.
Another option is to use the built-in defrag.exe command-line tool, which
gives you analysis info (both before and after), different levels of
defragmentation (see our blog for some parameters), etc. If you want to
know what the defragger is up to, you could set up a scheduled task to
run an analysis before and after defrag and output it to a text file.
I know these aren't necessarily the answers you're looking for, but I
hope they clarify our design choices.
--
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no
rights.
Want to learn more about Windows Server file and storage technologies?
Visit our team blog at
http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/default.aspx.
frankm said:
I read the blog below....
Just a couple of comments...
1) I don't know who they talked to about the progress gui, but it
wasn't me, I depend on the snapshot and progress.
2) The line on the new defrag gui - this may take several minutes to
several hours is more ambiguous than the progress ever was.
3) I never believed the 10-11% break point in XP and previous OS's
anyway. The reason why files get fragmented is that are the most used
and the most accessed, defrag anyway.
4) I would REALLY like at least the option of displaying a graphical
representation of the fragmentation and progress.
5) Yes there is a multi-pass in defrag, but at least I was used to
what it was doing and could more or less predict (with the graphical
state) when to come back to check if it was done.
6) I now have no idea when or if to run defrag. Is the new MS
algorithm any better than #3, I don't know, as the state is now hidden.
Not trying to be difficult, but I really don't want to be "dumbed down".
Frankm
Hi Chris,
Jeff gave you the workaround. To know why this change was made in Vista,
check the following FAQ
"Why was the defrag progress indicator removed?"
The Filing Cabinet : Disk Defragmenter FAQ:
http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/pages/disk-defragmenter-faq.aspx
--
Regards,
Ramesh Srinivasan, Microsoft MVP [Windows XP Shell/User]
Windows® XP Troubleshooting
http://www.winhelponline.com
At this point,
a 3rd party app, like O&O defrag; or Raxco.
that's if you need gui based, if not, running a command line defrag
still
works great.
Jeff
Really liked the XP defragmenter. I like to see how the defrag is
working
with the 2 bars displaying results. Any way to run a visual version of
defrag?
