Defrag

[Guest]

I've heard reasons why they dumbed down the new Defrag tool, but here's one
excellent reason why any feedback at all would help.

When I run the tool manually that stupid circle rotates and there's a
message saying it could take a few minutes to a few hours. Well, unless I
shut down the program it runs for days on end. Clearly if it was running
everyday at 4 AM it wouldn't take that long to defrag any of my drives, and
since there's no feedback, I have no idea whether it's actually doing
anything at all.

 

[Guest]

S Murder,

There are several conditions that could cause your defrag to run forever,
but it's sometimes hard to identify the problem off hand. Here are a couple
things you can try to see whether those help rectify the situation:

1. Before running defrag, run scandisk (now called Error-checking)
2. Run defrag in safe mode

If you aren't using a good disk cleaning program, here is a free disk
cleaning program called Ccleaner, that does a great job:

http://ccleaner.com/

Download and run it using the default settings. I use it all the time.

Here's a free program that provides a graphical picture of what's on your
hard drive. I was surprised when it showed that I had several large crash
dump files taking up a lot of hard drive space:

http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/faq.php

The download link is on the left. This program is very useful.

Here is a link to after market defrag programs, complete with a graphical
user interface. These are mostly shareware, some expensive and some very
reasonable, but I suppose you can find free defraggers out there:

http://www.bestvistadownloads.com/download-disk-defragmentation-software.html

They say that there is more than one way to skin a cat.