Defragmenter - help, please!

Charlton_King

Hi.

I am running Vista basic on a Dell Inspiron 531 desktop PC. Can anyone please tell me how to access the defragmentation programme as it seems to be nowhere obvious and googling provides little by way of pointers.

santer_2

Have you looked at start, all programmes, accessories, system tools?

Pugwash69

Type "Defrag" on the start menu search box.
There are other ways but that's fairly reliable.

Figment

Note that it will only run successfully in Safe mode. If you run it in normal mode it will never complete.

JethroUK

Figment wrote: »

Note that it will only run successfully in Safe mode. If you run it in normal mode it will never complete.

although it will defrag 99.99999999999999999999999% of the HDD - prolly explains why in working with MS since windows 3.1 I've never heard of anyone running it in safe mode

and thinking about it - it wont complete 100% even in safe mode

Charlton_King

Pugwash69 wrote: »

Type "Defrag" on the start menu search box.
There are other ways but that's fairly reliable.

That worked, thanks! I started a manual run at c12.30 and (I assume) it finished sometime this afternoon between 2 and 4 when I was out, leaving no box to show results or whatever behind it.

Now here's a curious thing: before starting that run I noticed immediately that, apparently, I had set the PC up (from new) to run the defrag programme every night at one a.m...
... but every day from c10p.m. I put the PC in 'sleep mode' overnight. To me this tends to imply that the prog wouldn't run.

Sure enough, the information box also said 'last run - 4th May 2012 at 0953' - in other words, it ran behind the scenes from the time I woke the beast up this morning to do internet shopping etc. Now I always thought you couldn't defragment and surf at the same time. Have I got that wrong, then????

googler

Defrag moves pieces of data around on the disk.

Surfing accesses some data on the disk

If doing both at one time, logic suggests that the operating system, will, if one program is accessing a file, make the other wait until the file is available, then work with it.

The likelihood of both wanting exactly the same piece at the same time is remote, though.....

pob1976

Can I recommend the defrag program in Tuneup Utilities 2008, it is very fast and works very well.

JethroUK

Charlton_King wrote: »

... I had set the PC up (from new) to run the defrag programme every night at one a.m... ..

Toooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo often

Not sure how much you think you'l benefit from defragging but every day is too often

Since windows 98 the system will not fragment a file whilst ever there is enough contiguous space of the HDD

= unless you HDD is near full you wont have any files to 'de-fragment'

= the HDD sizes used nowadays that = virtually never

2/ windows caching nowadays makes load time between fragmented & none fragments file negligible

Nett = if you de-fragment your drive more than once per year - it's once too often

3/ You are dramatically increasing the chance of file/HDD failure when relocating system file so you system wont start again

Evereyday you are taking a chance

smos585

JethroUK wrote: »

Toooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo often

Not sure how much you think you'l benefit from defragging but every day is too often

Since windows 98 the system will not fragment a file whilst ever there is enough contiguous space of the HDD

= unless you HDD is near full you wont have any files to 'de-fragment'

= the HDD sizes used nowadays that = virtually never

2/ windows caching nowadays makes load time between fragmented & none fragments file negligible

Nett = if you de-fragment your drive more than once per year - it's once too often

3/ You are dramatically increasing the chance of file/HDD failure when relocating system file so you system wont start again

Evereyday you are taking a chance

This is a subject which many folks have very different opinions, so I know some will say "rubbish" but I only speak from experience, and not just my own.

Firstly I agree that daily defragging is really unnecessary. Frequency is dependent on what use is made of the system; a really heavily used system maybe 3-6 months, for others once a year is enough.

Re yr point 2, While modern systems are much better than they were, but I'm not sure you can say that its not noticeable these days. Just run a bench mark, take a badly fragmented system, measure boot/load times etc. then without doing anything else, defrag it and do the same measurements. You will see an immediate improvement.

Re yr point 3, have to totally disagree on this one. Badly fragmented systems can cause the hdd to thrash, especially if it contains reasonable volume of files/folders. The consequence is that this is likely to reduce the life of the hdd. The answer is a balance between defragging and the frequency of doing it.

One of the worst aspects of Vista is the defrag utility, it tells you nothing. That is why many folks use the Defraggler utility here; http://www.filehippo.com/download_defraggler

Pugwash69

I use piriform's defraggler too. It recognises SSD drives too, which you don't need to defrag and should not even try.