Steve Thackery said:
Well, I don't really agree with Mike. 1am is just a scheduled start time.
The defrag runs as soon as possible after that if it's switched off at the
time. It runs for as long as necessary, at the lowest CPU priority and
the lowest I/O priority.
In fact, the Vista defrag tool is extremely gentle in terms of CPU, I/O
and memory loading. Apart from some audible disk activity you wouldn't
know it's running.
I strongly recommend that the OP forgets about defragging. Vista will
look after it just fine, quietly and effectively.
Only if you want to watch coloured blocks moving around on the screen
should you buy a third party tool.
Finally, one important warning: some (most??) third party defraggers
interfere with the file placement optimisation that Vista does as part of
its start up optimisation. They could actually make your start up slower.
For that reason, I recommend avoiding them.
See how you go with the built-in one. If you aren't happy, then would be
the time to think about the alternatives. Just remember the caveats.
SteveT
Having worked with the Diskeeper tool for nearly 10 years (from the NT 3.x
variants right up to the latest Vista and Server 2008 versions) I have to
take issue with a couple of your points.
The UI for Diskeeper does not just display blocks moving around in fact the
latest invisi-tasking had no visible UI unless the end user wants to see it
and obviously has nothing better to do.
The processing behind Diskeeper not only runs at low priority but also
honours the interrupts in processing due to other higher priority disk
access by the OS or end user processes, so effectively can run continuously
in the background not even "stealing" CPU cycles bit just using genuine
moments of inactivity.
Diskeeper fully honours the disk layout changes by the OS as regards startup
time optimisations undertaken but will still perform where necessary and
optimal defrag on these files to ensure the fastest startup time possible
and pre fetching processing.
The major point here is that the built in defrag tools is a one shot deal
scheduled to run when you want or triggered manually by the end user
products such as Diskeeper can run continuously in the background not
impacting performance but increasing the disk and file IO of the device
without detriment to the ongoing use of the system.