Slow to defrag in Vista

[FatRakoon]

I was humming and harring over whether to put this in the HD section, but decided it would be better off here.

Ok, this is the plan.

Vista 64 Ultimate... Runs sweet as a nut but over time it gets slower and slower to defrag.

Before you say thats normal, I mean that its become beyond the norm...

I am using O&O DeFrag 11 and when I am loking at it, I can read each and every single file name that comes up, these files are only a couple of MB large at most, for example, TTF fonts, or documents and so on.

I found this to be the case the last time I installed it, and then I was using a Raptor36 and since the disk was filling up anyway, I decided to move over to an 80GB but its doing the same on this.

I have just looked through all my Vista PCs and the yare all in pretty much the same boat, it gets clogged up badly over time ( they said it does not but it does )... I have done the usual tasks of clearing out any junk both with Windows own cleaner and CCleaner, plus I have manually moved all my DOCS to F: ( IU never usually have more than my immediately latest stuff kept in My Documents anyway - never have! )

Anyway, any clues to help speed it up other than an F&R or simply not bothering with Vista?

 

[johnerz]

Have you enough room to run the defrag effectivly on your hdd? the programme uses a fair bit of hdd/swopfile space, and therefore affected my hdd space memory fitted and swopfile size

 

[Mattus]

Mine has always defragged quickly enough. I don't see how it can be Vista's fault - there's nothing inherent to an operating system which can make your HDD defrag slowly. If the HD is heavily fragmented, it'll take a while to defrag; if it's not then it won't. The only ways to speed it up are to defrag more frequently or use a more efficient program.

 

[FatRakoon]

HD FREE SPACE:
Plenty. When I used the 36GB Raptor, I was keeping the HD space floating at 10GB Mark, which proved too much after a while and hence the 80GB now.
The only thing I use the 80GB for, is the one partition C: and only Windows itself and any system tools like DeFraggers, cleaners, A/V and such... Everything else is on my other drives, but again, these seem to have slowed down too even though they might not have changed all that much.
Its as if the basic process of actually defragging the system has taken a down turn??

Vista's Fault
No, I would not have thought so either, but get this... This is what I have just done in the last couple of hours...

I have grabbed another HD, this one is a 40GB Samsung. I threw on Vista 64 Premium, did a fresh install, added my usual apps and junk, upped it to SP2 etc and done all the regular updates. I am thinking about a fresh install anyway, so Im not doing anythign different and I have grabbed an image of it.

Now, I have been swapping this new fresh format with my current one, and I have been defragging not C: but all the others.

I have 6 HDs

C: Windows
D: Apps & Games
E: Media
F: Junk / Docs
M: Downloads ( WHY M? )
T: ISO Images

And the difference is absolutely astounding...

I started D: off ( The worst of them all ) and the blocks were a blur, you could not even see the directories never mind the single files, so I stopped it, swapped over the C: Drives again and defragged it and it was back to slow again.

I then tested this on all the other drives and on the fresh install, defragging was noticably quicker in every case.

As for defragging more frequently, Id agree yes... usually.

But its been getting progressively slower every time I do defrag and on teusday afternoon last week, when it had finished sundays defrag ( yeah you got it, 2 days to defrag about 40GB of files on an 80GB Drive ) I defragged it straight away again. It showed me that I only had 7 fragmented files and even in a Space Defrag ( The quickest ) it was last thign at night by the time it finished ( about 5 hours?? )

Thats simply not normal!!!!

It did this with the 36GB Raptor as I said, however, the speed of the PC is not affected, and tests show the HDs to be fine in every way, its only with defragging that its doing this.

And as for testing different programs, I have tried DeFraggler, O&O v8.6 and v11 , Disk Keeper , Contig , PowerDefragmenter and JKDEFRAG and the difference is not really that much to shout about and I opted for O&O because, well I have paid for it and I prefer it, but like I said, its no different really with any of them.

I dint know, perhaps there is some rogue app causing it to do this? I iwll need to go through it properly, but for it to happen before and now its happening again seems to me to be a bloody strange issue to have?