Vista Defrag

[CaptainCrash]

Say what?

Well, as one example, if you do a fragmentation analysis on the system partition straight after a "clean" install of XP, it will be a complete mess, presumably due to all the temporary file creation/deletion during the setup process. Vista in the same situation shows hardly any fragmentation, at least it did the last time I installed it.

I've also noticed that Vista data partitions I haven't touched for ages with any defrag tool seem to maintain low levels of fragmentation all by themselves, whereas back in the XP days I'd feel the need to defrag on a regular basis (similar sorts of data and usage). I'm not sure exactly what's been tweaked in Vista, but it definitely seems that bit smarter (more Linux-like?) in the way it allocates available disk space.

Perhaps, but it defrags much faster, it defrags 6 hdd's at once without moaning, and it has a progress bar and a nice graph...

I agree it looks very nice, but do you have any before/after benchmarks, either in isolation or compared with the Vista defragger?

I really don't believe file fragmentation is anything like the performance killer it used to be, particularly given the speed of modern HDDs - certainly not to the point where I'd pay out extra to the Church of Scientology or certain other snake-oil vendors.

 

[Admiral Huddy]

I use Power Defrag

Defrag your files, folders and disk quickly with Power Defragmenter. The utility provides a front end GUI screen to the contig.exe command making it easier to use. Great for Vista users where the windows defrag process takes a lot longer than XP. The contig.exe is included in the ZIP.

 

[Cob]

Vista installation pretty much just copies over an image of the OS, minus any features that your version of Vista doesn't include, so in theory it shouldn't be as fragmented as a fresh installation of XP is.