Vista disk defrag question

[EW]

Does Vista (Home Premium, in my case) defrag the hard drive(s) on its
own, without being scheduled to do so? I know I can manually force a
defrag, but what about unscheduled defrags? Thanks.

EW

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

Actually, by default it's scheduled to go once a week and you need do no
more. It will occur as a low priority background process automatically. You
will find this set in the Task Scheduler. As long as you don't remove the
task or disable the scheduler, it will happen automatically. If you do
disable either the task or the scheduler, then you will need to manually
start it when you suspect the drive is fragmented.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[xiowan]

Hi "EW":
Once you get SP1 installed, when you open the Vista Defrag program you
will have additional options for defragging your PC. Currently starting the
defrag program Vista will defrag all hard drives/volumes it thinks needs it.
With SP1 there is a button to select which drives/volumes you want to defrag
and start it immediately or set up automatic defragging for just the
drives/volumes you want to defrag.

xiowan.........in tucson

 

[Gary Mount]

If you open up "Task Scheduler" you should see in the Active Tasks section
an entry of "ScheduledDefrag". This scheduled task was automatically created
by the system.

 

[EW]

Thanks to you all for the replies. Now I know.
Best regards.

EW

 

[tempting2taanzaa]

I have a question about that. I recently downloaded the Auslogic Disk
Defragmentation tool and it found approximately 1,200 files fragmented. I
am sure that is not a lot considering the computer is a year old and all I
have used is the Windows disk defragmenter. However, about it running in
the background...does this only occur when your computer is idle or is this
when you are performing operations? I question this because I use a laptop
and I never leave it running, when it is on I am using it and when I'm not
using it, it is hibernating.

Thanks for your response!

 

[Westeban]

As long as the unit is plugged in, the defrag is no issue. If, however, you
go mobile with it, using the battery, I would suggest disabling the
auto-defrag, as it will consume power unecessarily by running the defrag in
the background even when you're running on the battery.

 

[Gary Mount]

If you are really concerned about defrag running down the battery, then I
would suggest that occasionally or somewhat frequently you explicitly run
defrag while the laptop is on external power, during a time when you are not
using the laptop. Then there won't be much work that defrag has to do and it
won't run for long if it starts to run while on battery power alone. Then
you can leave defrags scheduled task (auto-defrag) alone.

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

The default defrag process will run as a low priority process. Obviously it
will run when idle, but whether or not it runs while in use depends on the
degree of use. Heavy demands would preclude it, but light ones would not. As
to how Auslogic will run, I can't answer as I don't use it. I have tried
some others, perfectdisk among them, and the results are similar to the
standard process. I personally think that defragging is overrated, and
casual users will not see much benefit from it. Heavy gamers, video editors,
autocad users maybe, but casual users do not put that much demand on their
system and will likely notice little if any difference in response times
even on a moderately fragmented system.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[Manny Weisbord]

And in answer to your question - Vista defrag runs automatically when the
machine is idle. There's no need to schedule it at all.

See here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942092

And that "runs automatically" is at 1am every Wednesday.

It is conceivable that someone might want to use the scheduler to run
it at a different time, or more frequently.

 

[Gordon]

And that "runs automatically" is at 1am every Wednesday.

It is conceivable that someone might want to use the scheduler to run
it at a different time, or more frequently.

Err no. Read the article. Look under "More Information". Defrag runs ALL THE
TIME when the machine is idle.

 

[Manny Weisbord]

Err no. Read the article. Look under "More Information". Defrag runs ALL THE
TIME when the machine is idle.

Err no. Read the article. Look under "More Information".

I'll quote it here for you since you seem to be having trouble reading
it elsewhere, Mr. Know-it-all:

"In Windows Vista, there are many improvements in the defrag engine
and in the manageability of fragmentation. By default, Windows Vista
uses Task Scheduler to automatically keep the hard disk defragmented."

"You can now use Task Scheduler to schedule defragmentation.
Therefore, you do not have to manually start defragmentation. By
default, a task is created and is set to run at 1 A.M. on every
Wednesday. If the computer is turned off or if the task does not run
at the scheduled time, the task will run the next time that the
computer is idle."