Defragmenter in Vista taking to long or not working

[PCPAL]

After four hours the Vista defragmenter was still defragmenting the hard drive. Why is it taking to long?
OS is vista ultimate.

[John B]

It could be a normal thing...Reasons: maybe you never did a defrag before or it was a long time ago, maybe a lot of data has changed on your disk, maybe you have an antivirus or any other program that makes the defrag often restart...

[PCPAL]

It could be a normal thing...Reasons: maybe you never did a defrag before or it was a long time ago, maybe a lot of data has changed on your disk, maybe you have an antivirus or any other program that makes the defrag often restart...

That long? Just last month I did a clean install of ultimate. Thanks.

[John B]

Yes it's possible...but take a look to see if there is a progress at least in % from time to time

Don't forget that you have a 5400 RPM so it's even more longer than with a 7200RPM regular desktop PC disk

The best is to let it run while being away from computer, also try to close as many programs as possible (including antivirus) and don't forget to disable sleep

[PCPAL]

Yes it's possible...but take a look to see if there is a progress at least in % from time to time

Don't forget that you have a 5400 RPM so it's even more longer than with a 7200RPM regular desktop PC disk

The best is to let it run while being away from computer, also try to close as many programs as possible (including antivirus) and don't forget to disable sleep

In vista there is no percentage meter. At least I can't find one. I'll try to defrag it again tonight before I hit the sack. Thanks.

[DMANbluesfreak]

Yeah vista defragmenter sucks... try Auslogics Defragmenter. It goes at least 2-3 times as fast and does a better job.

[R4000]

Yeah vista defragmenter sucks... try Auslogics Defragmenter. It goes at least 2-3 times as fast and does a better job.

I second this. Auslogics has worked well for me. Here is the latest updated version http://www.auslogics.com/disk-defrag/index.php

[Andromeda]

Vista's defragmenter has no option to see the progress display or to gauge when the defrag will be complete. As I've said before, it's a great idea i.e. automatic system defrag- but poorly implemented by Microsoft. Sadly, it looks like SP1 won't fix the broken Vista defragger apart from giving an option of selecting the volumes on which it will run. If it worked properly, then it would have been killer - fully automatic and smart defrag without the user needing to do a thing...unlike manual or scheduled defrag.

[mmk1125]

Personally I find the progress bar and colour blocks redundant in Vista defrag. I run it once a week and I always leave it running in the background while I do whatever I need on the notebook except gaming. Check back in a few hours and it's done. Never timed it myself but I don't remember it taken longer than 2 hours on my 100GB HDD about 80% full.

I see many recommendations with Auslogics Defrag. Used it before on XP and I agree it is fast, too fast in fact. Sometimes I wonder if it did its job probably or not. I have my reserve with its proclaimed n% performance gain after defrag to be honest.

[R4000]

I see many recommendations with Auslogics Defrag. Used it before on XP and I agree it is fast, too fast in fact. Sometimes I wonder if it did its job probably or not. I have my reserve with its proclaimed n% performance gain after defrag to be honest.

In my case, it usually reports nil performance gain or 1% on a busy week, as I defrag quite often.

What I found interesting is watching the program as it's proccessing the clusters of each file (of certain size). That is one thing I never saw in any native Windows defragger, as it was never intimately shown what was going on.