Microsoft are clueless

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Anyone else hate the new defragmentation feature in Vista?

You can either set it to run automatically, which isn't practical unless you leave your computer on overnight wasting energy, or run it manually.

However, they have made a real botch job of running it manually. You can't just open the defrag feature and tell it to get on with it. No that would be too obvious. Instead you have to wait five or ten minutes while it analyses the disks and decides if they need defragmenting. After that time instead of just getting on with it, it requires user intervention to click the damn button telling it to do the defrag.

So, if like me you find it convenient to defrag while at lunch, and you go for lunch at variable times, you have to remember to kick off defragmenter ten minutes before going to lunch so you are still at your desk when it comes up with this dumb "continue" button.

Do Microsoft ever test their software from a usability point of view? Each version of Defrag has got worse since Windows 98 which was quite good - I used to sit a watch the little blocks get tidied up on screen. It was quite satisfying to watch.

You're right, the old defrag was very nice to watch. Satisfying is the perfect word to describe it.

Perhaps it's an aspie thing to enjoy sitting watching the blocks get tidied up. I seem to remember the original defrag software with the graphical display was developed by someone else back in the days of DOS or Windows 3.1 and Microsoft bought out the company.

Microsoft changed the visual display for XP to those before and after ribbon strips, which was OK but not as satisfying as the Windows 98 blocks. In Vista there is no visual display at all, which sort of takes the fun out of it, making defrag purely functional.

I do find it frustrating having to hang around waiting for software to come up with badly placed "Continue" buttons. They should do this right from the beginning, perhaps with a check box worded something like "Defragment disks if necessary", then you can just walk away and let it get on with it.

When I ran vista I always did it from the command line. There you could specify a the -v flag so it would defrag frags larger than 64MB. Or maybe it wasn't -v. I forget. Yeah.

It's sad to see that Microsoft doesn't really have a new filesystem with Windows 7. Fragmentation is so 1990s. Why not use xfs, or ReiserFS! (stabbystabstabstab)

I prefer the defrag program in Windows 98, that was entertaining, it would at least push everything it can to the beginning of the disk, or a the picture would suggest, to the top. Did get annoying after some disk activity was involved and start again. Windows XP just lost what it was about, leaving huge spaces between stuff

Sounds just like the Windows installer- stop and ask for input every 10 minutes, rather than asking all the questions at the start like the installer for any sensible operating system.

I've never defragged. It's nice that my operating systems use real filesystems. (hfs+ and ext3 don't need to be defragged)

I hate how you can't see the graphical representation of it. I need to see it to decide for myself but instead it blindly defragments away and you haven't a clue what's going on.

I believe the intention in the NT defrag.exe was to push everything to the beginning of the platter, which really makes things faster.

I guess that's like me enjoying watching my Ubuntu update to a later version, or downloading and installing many programs (just like that, unlike Windows) for me in the terminal.

I loved the alignment of the blocks in the old defrag!

Hear Hear....

Windows does NOT need to be defragged very often unless....

- You are constantly installing and uninstalling applications.
- You are working with very large data which is speed critical (large amounts of video).
- You are constantly running out of disk space

It doesn't matter if your word document is fragmented. Sure, it might take a nanosecond or two longer to load... but who cares?

Stop defragmenting.

What if we do all three

Ah... but defrag was so pretty... I also spent hours watching it.

Then you realised what an incompetent OS you were watching.

One that had "unmoveable blocks".

I.e. an OS that had not the slightest clue which bits of itself were where... in RAM? Swapped? Some DLL code that would collapse in a heap if it was not left exactly where it originally came from on the storage medium?

An OS that couldn't understand the difference between a drive and a partition?

An OS that allowed a screensaver to cause a defrag to restart?

An OS that required (sorry, requires) a reboot when you do anything other than change the desktop image?

Only time I've seen real performance increases from defragging an NTFS partition was after deleting many millions of files off the disk.

only time I have ever seen any type of performance on my computer is when i took windows off my computer

You'd want to install diskeeper then. Windows should automatically be able to handle the file system itself, but third party programs do it better.