Vista Defrag question.

I notice that Vista(Home Premium) performs defragmentation as primarily a background operation, with not much more info than a spinning circle and a blinking HHD light to indicate that the operation is still in progress. Is there any way to bring datails of the progress to the foreground? I kinda want to get an idea of how long the computer has left, to determine whether I should wait up, or leave my unit on overnight. The "reliability and performance monitor" can tell you of activity, but not progress.

The defrag interface is extremely simplistic. In fact, it seems that every new edition of Windows has been made progressively more and more simplistic, but now this is too far.

Anyone been able to determine progress and time estimates while running defrag?

 

Depend on your HDD size & file capacity

Windows built-in defrag program is really slowwwwww. Use 3rd party Defrag tool

 

Depend on your HDD size & file capacity

Windows built-in defrag program is really slowwwwww. Use 3rd party Defrag tool


Auslogics Disk Defrag 1.1.5.225(It's Free & Fast )

 

Uh, I think that is obvious. however your response didn't address a single point of my question.

My question is simple. Is there a visual indication available in Windows Vista that indicates the level of progress during a defrag? i.e. how much time remaining, percentage remaining, etcetera.

 

No...I also have that problem.Don't know why Microsoft remove visual indicate part

 

are you sure it's not the OS updating/flushing its cache, or the new search indexer making its rounds?

 

I wish I could help you as no one seems to be giving a straight answer. But I have XP so I can't help on this one. Sorry.

 

in short no, there is no visual indication.

all you get is that annoying spinning blue icon, and when its done its done.

kinda sucks..but there is no need to manually defragment if u just let it do its thing once very 3 days.

 

No. This is one of many improvements in Vista from XP. You had too much knowledge of the defragmentation process with XP. This has been removed for your protection.

 

That and..if you don't know the state of your fragmentation, you can't blame your OS and file system for doing such a lousy job and the built-in defragmentor for being so useless

Invest in Diskeeper 7 Pro Premier (or just diskeeper 7) or Raxco's Perfectdisk 8. They're both quite good. O&O Defrag isn't bad either.

Diskeeper advertises itself as specializing in "performance optimization" and automated defragging (sort of what Windows does now - esp. as the Windows defragger is a crippled version of an out-of-date Diskeeper edition). It's not bad at manual defragmentation though.

PerfectDisk focuses more on manual defragmentation and consolidating free space. i'm sure fans of either will tell you one algorithm and/or defragmentation style is better than the other - but either should be far better than the built-in Vista one.

All the 3rd party defragmentation utilities listed above can defrag your pagefile and MFT in an offline defrag session (although if you set your page file correctly, there should never be a need to defrag it).

As for real performance gains from one of these vs the Vista built-in one...well, that's up to you to decide

 

There's a nice explanation of why there's no GUI for the defrag utility in This GLine Post. If you read the comments, there is a link to a suggestion on how to get one. You can also Read it Here.

 

Yeah, the one in Vista REALLY sucks. I am using Auslogics instead.
In fact, it sucks so bad that i once, right after defragging my drive with Auslogics(which took only 1 minute to finish), tried to defrag my drive with the built-in Windows one. But after letting it do it's thing for one hour, i had to cancel, as this was getting absurd. What the hell was Microsoft thinking when they put that PoS in Vista, i don't know.

 

lol.

I use Auslogics as well, as it appears much faster than the native defrag utility and I can see what it is doing..........