Vista Defragger
If you run Windows Vista, then you've doubtless found that the defrag
utility that comes with Vista gives no information on how fragmented a drive
is before it actually starts rearranging the drive, nor does it give any
indication of the progress during the defrag. What you don't know is
Microsoft also changed how the defragger treats files larger than 64mb,
choosing to compress those files into only 64mb chunks, but not compress
individual chunks together to make one single contiguous large file. I've
done some poking around on the net and discovered you can resolve either
problem without buying expensive third-party defraggers or hacking Windows.
If you want to know whether or not you should defrag a disk, open a Command
Prompt and type:
defrag c: -a -v
This instructs the command line defragger to run an analysis of the c: drive
and print out detailed statics on how fragmented the drive is.
During my reading, the author actually suggested that the default 64mb chunk
defrag the GUI version of the defragger does is fine, and running the
thorough defrag won't improve system performance much if any. However, he
did suggest that if you recently upgraded to Vista from previous version of
Windows, you will definitely want to run this procedure once to clean things
up:
defrag c: -v -w
Be aware that this procedure takes far longer, and therefore should be run
when the computer will not be in use for several hours. If you believe you
need to run this more than once, than the author suggests that once a month
is sufficient, while the GUI defragger will handle everything else during
it's weekly scheduled defrag.
There are a few other command line options you could choose to run, so I
suggest anybody interested type:
defrag -?
to get the complete list of available switches and proper syntax.