Win7 Scheduled defragmentation...

Does it even work? i've noticed scheduled defragmention never activates, i've tried different times, days, etc. i've tried it with laptop awake, sleep, hibernate but all to no avail, i defragment manually and that's the last date/time shown every time i check, auto defrag never takes place, any thoughts? this is an oem installed Win7 build 7600, thanks.

p.s. i'm not running SSD's which to my understanding disables defragmention in Win7.

 

Windows 7 should defragment your machine in the background, without user intervention, usually when you aren't using it.

It will never run when your computer is sleeping or in hibernation and take note of this:

You may want to ensure that one program isn't using the entire disk around the scheduled defragmentation time.

Mine last ran on the 22nd of October yet is scheduled to auto defragment every Wednesday at 1 AM. Perhaps it's intelligent enough to perform a disk analysis and defragment according to the schedule only if it's required? *Shrugs*

 

That's certainly food for thought, who am i to question Win7's "intellect", you may very well be correct, i'm curious what other members experience is with Win7 auto defrag...

 

Thanks guys, your reasoning makes complete sense and i'll accept it as factual until proven otherwise.

 

NTFS doesn't need to be defragmented. You can realize a one-time performance gain by manually defragging your page space and any hibernation/sleep files.

Much of what you do with defragging gets undone pretty quickly in the normal day to day operation of the filesystem.

Go to technet for the relevant documentation.

NTFS isn't FAT16.

 

Well I suppose we can dismiss Microsoft's constant reminders about defragging. Why is it that everyone seems to think they know an OS better than the actual developers?

Your claim is also contradictory with everyone's experiences with XP... in Vista/7 defragging has become less relevant, but in XP it was a serious detriment to performance.

 

To the OP, both Vista and Windows 7 has dynamic defragmentation whereby if your computer is in idle mode for an extended period of time the OS will check fragmentation and if necessary it will begin to defrag the hard drive including boot files.

 

Scheduled defragmentation on W7/vista not starting up on a preset schedule is not an uncommon phenomenon..why exactly, I don't know since I don't use it (mine's a third party defragger). But it could have something to do with dependent services for the defragger and/or scheduler not being enabled, so might want to check into those. BTW, the W7/vista defraggers are not really 'automatic' because they don't start up automatically; they have to be triggered on a preset schedule or manually, after which they defrag slowly at low priority in the background for a while.

As for the need for defragging, IMO it hasn't really changed much from XP to W7..while CPUs and memory speeds have grown rapidly, mechanical HDD speeds (especially the slow laptop drives) haven't shown as much improvement, so the HDD is still the bottleneck. Anything to improve its performance is good.

 

IMO and again it's IMO but I prefer to run Windows defrag from the command prompt in admin mode. It does a through defrag of the hard drive.

defrag c: -w -v

 

Your comment is very hurtful. I might cry right now, but I have to admit that I am totally agree with you in this one.

 

Check this article out...it will answer quite a bit

Disk Defragmentation ? Background and Engineering the Windows 7 Improvements - Engineering Windows 7 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

One of the features that you’ve been pretty clear about (I’ve received over 100 emails on this topic!) is the desire to improve the disk defrag utility in Windows 7. We did. And from blogs we saw a few of you noticed, which is great. This is not as straight forward as it may appear. We know there’s a lot of history in defrag and how “back in the day” it was a very significant performance issue and also a big mystery to most people. So many folks came to know that if your machine is slow you had to go through the top-secret defrag process. In Windows Vista we decided to just put the process on autopilot with the intent that you’d never have to worry about it. In practice this turns out to be true, at least to the limits of automatically running a process (that is if you turn your machine off every night then it will never run). We received a lot of feedback from knowledgeable folks wanting more information on defrag status, especially during execution, as well as more flexibility in terms of the overall management of the process. This post will detail the changes we made based on that feedback. In reading the mail and comments we received, we also thought it would be valuable to go into a little bit more detail about the process, the perceptions and reality of performance gains, as well as the specific improvements. This post is by Rajeev Nagar and Matt Garson, both are Program Managers on our File System feature team. --Steven

 

comparing filesystem management in xp/vista to how things happen under the hood in WIn7 is foolish.

Bundling xp and vista together is foolish.

 

why would that be foolish?

 

different versions of ntfs, different replication patterns & algorithms internal to the mft (and for syncing the two+ copies of the mft), different policies for sector reuse and reallocation, different handing of sparse and dense files, and different api for external defrag tools.