Vista - Windows Defrag

My Lenovo PC came with Diskeeper installed and when it had a problem this week, I did get Diskeeper to tell me that Lenovo would have to deal with the issue. Of course my computer is now out of warranty and that is not an option.

The tech suggested that perhaps if I uninstalled Diskeeper maybe Windows Defrag would take over?

I started to look around for the Microsoft Defrag but am unable to find it. It should be part of Vista but I can't find out where I would go to enable it if I continue to have issues with Diskeeper.

Any ideas where extra Windows programs might be hiding?

As far as I know the only way to restore the Windows Defrag in the Start menu when Diskeeper is installed is to uninstall Diskeeper, as DK replaces the Windows shortcuts with its own. Probably a hold over from XP in which XP's defrag was nothing more than a stripped down version of Diskeeper Lite (version 7 I believe it was).

That being said you can still try and run Vista's own by typing cleanmgr in the Start search box. If that doesn't work you will find it located in the System32 folder and try running it from there.

Thanks.

I have a habit of really messing things up when I experiment.

Since Diskeeper is working right now I won't do the Cleanmgr thing and when I took a look in the System 32 folder I just wasn't sure which file was actually Defrag.

So I suppose that Diskeeper is actually the better program?

This Lenovo PC installed a lot of traditional things that have really dealt me a fit.

Thanks again.

Hi Vegaspat,

If you want to defragment your drive you can do this from the command prompt.
In the Start Search type cmd , right click command prompt and run as Administrator.
In the command prompt window type defrag.exe c : -w for defragmenting partition C,
or type defrag.exe -c -w for all drives then press Enter. You can do that as the
second option from the Diskeeper.

Cheers...

Thanks.

Right now Diskeeper is working but if it happens again I will try your suggestion.

Do you have an opinion on Diskeeper vs. Windows Defrag?

Well, I never used Diskeeper, but can tell that defragmenting the hard drive from
command prompt you can defragment chunks bigger than 64MB. The default...
the automatic defragmentation performs this task partially, it consolidates files
smaller than 64MB.

Thanks.

@vegaspat what % of free space do you have on your drive? I've found that quick and dirty defrags, such as done with Auslogics Defrag, several times a week can keep you good for quite awhile if you have better than 70% free space. Trying to keep an 80% utilized drive defragged is almost a waste of time. I just copy stuff I want to keep but that isn't essential onto an external drive. I keep the internal HD usage below 20% most of the time. If I do have large files, I process them, delete them off, then do a quick defrag. The more free space you have and the more often you defrag the less time it takes. Although the Diskeeper "in the background" defrag contradicts the purpose of defragging in the first place imho.

Once a month or so I'll use defrag.exe with the -b switch to defrag boot files. Then maybe once or twice a year I'll do one of those thorough defrags that arranges the order of stuff and maybe messes with MFTs, but the rest of the time the quicky defrag is all you need if performed often.

I have a 250 GB drive with 163 GB free space. I do keep a lot of my files on an external drive.

It's just that I became alarmed when Diskeeper wasn't functioning and realized that I no longer had access to the Windows Defrag.

After I shut the system down for a short period, Diskeeper started working again.

I also didn't realize until this came up that Lenovo had replaced the Windows version with Diskeeper. I was going to check out the Lenovo site to see if I could download it if necessary. Guess I'd better check that option out.

Thanks for the info.

Sure thing. I didn't mean to preach to the choir.
There are a few good free defraggers out there.
It figures one or the other will be a bit better or worse on the particular machine.
The only time I had a real problem in XP or later was on Vista because the machine was new and I didn't know they had defrag in the scheduled tasks. Well guess what? I'm in the middle of using jkDefrag when the scheduler decides it's a good time to launch Windows defrag.exe!! Needless to say jkDefrag crashed!!