Vista - Defrag question

Is there a way in the Home Premium version to watch the defrag, like the
red and blue bars in XP?

3rd party app?

Nope. Not an out-of-the-box feature, and now is regulated to "set it and
forget it" status - which is probabbly what it should be now. I'd long ago
written a little script for XP which enabled me to defrag the harddrives
[all of 'em] without having to bother looking. Just ran the script and it
was all taken care of, no need for red and blue bars. You can do as much now
with Vista using the defrag command and the -c swtich.

If you have very special and particular defragmentation needs you are
looking at a 3rd party app. Not too many people need such fine tuning of the
defrag process but sometimes, say with a huge, networked, often updated,
often accessed video file, such a thing does save cycles/time/money/etc.

--

Saucy Lemon
(For email, remove the caps in address)


"Mike Oxbig" <smbkrun3@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:O5uf3$7THHA.920@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
> Is there a way in the Home Premium version to watch the defrag, like the
> red and blue bars in XP?

Nope.

See Jill Zoeller's[MSFT] blog--"The Filing Cabinet."

"Why did you simplify the Disk Defragmenter interface?
The Windows Vista Disk Defragmenter was simplified primarily for the purpose
of removing it out of the face of the user. It runs periodically and keeps
your file system fragmentation at acceptable levels, making it unnecessary
for you to launch the tool itself. With the new UI, you can see that we
really don't want defrag to be something that people have to worry about,
just like any number of other low-level capabilities in the OS.

The new interface seems "dumbed down." Why remove all the detail?
Interestingly enough, one of the biggest and consistent complaints we had
from users (broad sample here from home users to experienced IT Pros) in the
past was that a vast majority of them had no idea what the detailed
fragmentation statistics they saw meant. The Windows XP graphical view also
had some limitations and inaccuracies that prevented it from being included
in Windows Vista. If you really want to keep a close eye on fragmentation,
I'd recommend using the command-line tool Defrag.exe.

Why was the defrag progress indicator removed?
Part of the problem with the Windows XP defrag tool was that percent
complete was not accurate or meaningful. Depending on the phase of defrag,
1% of progress could take from several seconds to minutes, which made the
progress indicator highly unreliable. The difficulty here is that since
defrag is a multi-pass process (multiple iterations of file defragmentation
and free space consolidation) there is no way to accurately predict when
defrag will complete since the number of loop iterations and how long each
takes are highly dependent on the layout of the files on the volume, the
level of file and free space fragmentation, and the other system activity.
While I agree that having no progress is bad, misleading progress I believe
is worse. Also, the idea behind the new automated defrag is that users will
not have to think about it not worry about the progress it is making. With
defrag running regularly, the system will be close to optimal levels of
fragmentation, and subsequent defrag runs should not take long."


http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/pag...enter-faq.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/arc...r/default.aspx

I hope this helps;you should read the resources that Jill Zoeller [MSFT] has
put on her blog, before dismimssing Vista defrag. Like Vista, it has its
iceberesque aspect, and there is more to it than meets the eye and Jill has
done a good job of pointing this out. The blog is also an excellent
resource for Volume Shadow topics, system restore topics, and other file and
storage topics and some of the extrapolation of the Windows Server 2003
tools that have been adapted for Vista. Jill also has done a good job of
including the Beta chats (and the Defrag team's chat is included as well).

CH


"Mike Oxbig" <smbkrun3@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:O5uf3$7THHA.920@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
> Is there a way in the Home Premium version to watch the defrag, like the
> red and blue bars in XP?

Mike

Search this newsgroup and the file.management newsgroup for defrag. There
have been some extensive discussions about using defrag in Vista.

--

Ronnie Vernon
Microsoft MVP
Windows Shell/User


"Mike Oxbig" <smbkrun3@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:O5uf3$7THHA.920@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
> Is there a way in the Home Premium version to watch the defrag, like the
> red and blue bars in XP?

No, there isn't.

--
/* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* Robert Firth *
* Windows Vista x86 RTM *
* http://www.WinVistaInfo.org *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * */

"Mike Oxbig" <smbkrun3@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:O5uf3$7THHA.920@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
> Is there a way in the Home Premium version to watch the defrag, like the
> red and blue bars in XP?

On Tue, 13 Feb 2007 17:41:02 -0500, "Mike Oxbig" <smbkrun3@gmail.com>
spake thusly:

>Is there a way in the Home Premium version to watch the defrag, like the
>red and blue bars in XP?

Get yourself a third party defag program. They you can see even MORE
than you did in XP.

Besides, they're better anyway.

I highly recommend Raxco PerfectDisk. Diskeeper is a very close
second.