Defragmenter in Vista taking to long or not working

After four hours the Vista defragmenter was still defragmenting the hard drive. Why is it taking to long?
OS is vista ultimate.

 

It could be a normal thing...Reasons: maybe you never did a defrag before or it was a long time ago, maybe a lot of data has changed on your disk, maybe you have an antivirus or any other program that makes the defrag often restart...

 

That long? Just last month I did a clean install of ultimate. Thanks.

 

Yes it's possible...but take a look to see if there is a progress at least in % from time to time

Don't forget that you have a 5400 RPM so it's even more longer than with a 7200RPM regular desktop PC disk

The best is to let it run while being away from computer, also try to close as many programs as possible (including antivirus) and don't forget to disable sleep

 

In vista there is no percentage meter. At least I can't find one. I'll try to defrag it again tonight before I hit the sack. Thanks.

 

Yeah vista defragmenter sucks... try Auslogics Defragmenter. It goes at least 2-3 times as fast and does a better job.

 

I second this. Auslogics has worked well for me. Here is the latest updated version http://www.auslogics.com/disk-defrag/index.php

 

Vista's defragmenter has no option to see the progress display or to gauge when the defrag will be complete. As I've said before, it's a great idea i.e. automatic system defrag- but poorly implemented by Microsoft. Sadly, it looks like SP1 won't fix the broken Vista defragger apart from giving an option of selecting the volumes on which it will run. If it worked properly, then it would have been killer - fully automatic and smart defrag without the user needing to do a thing...unlike manual or scheduled defrag.

 

Personally I find the progress bar and colour blocks redundant in Vista defrag. I run it once a week and I always leave it running in the background while I do whatever I need on the notebook except gaming. Check back in a few hours and it's done. Never timed it myself but I don't remember it taken longer than 2 hours on my 100GB HDD about 80% full.

I see many recommendations with Auslogics Defrag. Used it before on XP and I agree it is fast, too fast in fact. Sometimes I wonder if it did its job probably or not. I have my reserve with its proclaimed n% performance gain after defrag to be honest.

 

In my case, it usually reports nil performance gain or 1% on a busy week, as I defrag quite often.

What I found interesting is watching the program as it's proccessing the clusters of each file (of certain size). That is one thing I never saw in any native Windows defragger, as it was never intimately shown what was going on.

 

I have about 20 GB full on my 100 GB 7200 RPM hard drive and have no problems with the Vista degrag tool. I run it once per week and it finishes successfully in what I would estimate at less than an hour. I'll have to keep track of time next time I run it and post back, but I am not sure what is the cause of all the problems people are having.

 

My first defrag was 1 month after a clean install of Vista. I was using 110Gb or 160 when I defraged - it took 11 hours. So yes, it can be very slow.
I have been told it is faster if you run if from the command line - not sure why, as I assume it uses the same defrag algorithms.

 

It's completely stupid not to have an progress indicator, because there are some times you have to defrag, and you have to make sure the defrag is complete, before you do the next step. So when you launch the defrag in that circumstance, you want the progress indicator so you plan your time. Looking to see which processes are the defrag and guessing if it's really done because you don't see them is moronic.

 

oh really? so you can't defrag if you cant see the progress indicator?

Like I said with Vista defrag I leave it to run in the background while I do whatever I want on the notebook. Unlike with XP when I had to leave the PC idle for a period of time during defrag, now that's when you have to plan beforehand.

 

No, what you cannot do is intelligently estimate how long it's going to take to decide if you really want to defrag now, or maybe some other time when you have time. Remember, this mostly applies to the situation where you have to know that the defragmentation is complete before you take the next step. Such as when installing certain types of software.