Defragging issues

[mikewl]

A few days ago I found myself low on disk space so uninstalled alot of old games and apps and had a general tidy up of my computer, after this I thought maybe I should defrag the drive, I did and it took about 3 days non stop to finish and now im sure everything I do on my pc is slower than before, considerably slower, opening Outlook and IE takes awhile wheras before it was quite fast, opening music in media player takes awhile now.

I thought defragging was meant to help keep things running smoother but it seems to have had the opposite effect.

Im not sure if I should just do a new install of Vista, im abit hessitant due to the possible problems activating it again (Have had to speak to MS support a few times and go through a long process to get a new activation key).

Anyone know if this is a common issue after defragging? and what else I could do to improve things.

Cheers

Mike

[anephric]

What did you use to defrag? And how big is (are) your drives(s)? 72 hours is pushing it a bit. I've defragged 160gb discs that were full of fractured crap and the most it took was a few hours. Did you just use the built-in Vista defragger? I've never touched Vista but I certainly never bothered with XP's defragger. Try something like Diskeeper - it's free to trial (with no limitations, iirc) for 30 days and it's so much better than XP's.

If you're running out of drive space, most defraggers won't run well because they need room on the drive to move stuff around, which is why it may have taken so long.

[mikewl]

its a 230gig drive, I had about 80gig free when I started the defrag and yup it was the standard Vista defragger.

Im going to give that one you suggested a try.

[anephric]

It's loads better. Plus you can turn on active defrag which constantly defrags your disc when it's idling (eats up a few per cent of CPU cycles, though). It'll also, if you turn the option on (IFAAST or something) write to the disc in a more organised fashion, hence less fragmentation.

[mikewl]

It's loads better. Plus you can turn on active defrag which constantly defrags your disc when it's idling (eats up a few per cent of CPU cycles, though). It'll also, if you turn the option on (IFAAST or something) write to the disc in a more organised fashion, hence less fragmentation.

Nice, I think im going to purchase this, its 15% through defragging already, much faster than before.

[anephric]

It's the best defragger I've ever used. And I don't even get paid to say that!

[Hohum]

Perfectdisk would be my favourite... arguably faster than Diskeeper, and also doesn't have software activation rubbish like Diskeeper does (if you do actually buy it).

[kernow]

It's loads better. Plus you can turn on active defrag which constantly defrags your disc when it's idling (eats up a few per cent of CPU cycles, though). It'll also, if you turn the option on (IFAAST or something) write to the disc in a more organised fashion, hence less fragmentation.

It'll also kill your hard drive in record time. I ignore all of these products. I just go for a self-defragging filesystem in the first place.

[gunrock]

Perfectdisk would be my favourite... arguably faster than Diskeeper, and also doesn't have software activation rubbish like Diskeeper does (if you do actually buy it).

Another vote for PerfectDisk. I bought it a couple of years ago (for my video drive) and I find that defragging once a month or six weeks does wonders (but then again I have low turnover of drive space - i.e I don't add/delete or change much on my machine, only sporadically).

[anephric]

It'll also kill your hard drive in record time. I ignore all of these products. I just go for a self-defragging filesystem in the first place.

Yeah, I know, but if you (for whatever reason) have a system where you're continually writing and deleting large amounts of data, it's useful. Probably not as much for regular users.

It's more sophisticated and user-configurable than I've indicated in my general blah, too. If you turn on IFAAST in conjunction with it, it'll sequence files on the disc in a far more logical order, based on freqency of file access. It's not like it's just sitting there waiting for 2% fragmentation so it can rape your disc.

[anephric]

Having just had a look, apparently the defragger that comes with XP is a muchos cutdown version of Diskeeper. Never knew that! Saying that, the Pro flavour optimised my fraggy system files a lot better than the basic XP one.

[saif]

the ccleaner company have made a defragger called defraggler. its good - you can defrag individual files which is useful.

[SqueakyG]

I wouldn't touch Vista's defragger again. It's awful. Not only because it gives you no readout whatsoever -- not even a progress percentage. But because it was entirely broken when I tried it.

Three months after getting the PC (500GB disk, 150GB used), I set Vista's defrag going. Constant loud disk activity as you'd expect. But I had no idea what it was doing because of no readout. After 6 hours, I wondered if something was wrong, because defrags in XP never took more than 3 hours. Eventually I clicked "cancel", but it didn't stop the loud heavy disk activity. I eventually rebooted.

Then I downloaded a shareware third-party defragger. It's helpful graphic readout showed that Vista hadn't defragged a damn thing during those 6 hours! In fact it may have scrambled things up worse. The third-party defragger did the job in 90 minutes.

Additional observation: now when I analyse the disk for fragmentation, do you know what all the fragmented sectors contain? Vista's "System Volume Information" (system restore, basically). Instantly fragmented. Badly.

Trouble now is finding a new 30-day trial defragger every month...

[chis]

Ignore the defraggers that Windows provides (the commercial version of Diskeeper is hardly better), and use this:

http://www.kessels.com/JkDefrag/

Here's a handy GUI:

http://www.emro.nl/freeware/

Unpack both packages into the same place and run the GUI.

[anephric]

I recently tried Perfectdisk 8 and, yeah, it does seem a lot nicer than Diskeeper. It's GUI isn't as user-friendly, though.