Tag Archives: defrag

Why is Vista’s disk defragmentation system so bad?

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Ever since Microsoft released Windows Vista in 2007, I’ve absolutely hated the Disk Defragmenter in the operating system. It was fine in 98, 2000, and XP, but in Vista it is absolutely stupid.

For some reason, it automatically decides that you want to defragment all of your disk drives by default – and most of the time this is not the case for me. It spends absolutely ages “analysing” drives – to the point when I just give up and cancel it before it’s even started defragmenting.

It’s just such a failure – what happened Microsoft?

A lot of people say defragmentation is a total waste of time, but I think it does work now and then and it can improve hard disk performance (even if it’s just a little).

If you agree with me that defragmentation is a good idea, I’ve found a solution to the Vista defragmentation issues. It’s a little freeware program called Auslogics Disk Defrag. It works in all versions of Windows from 2000 up, so if you like it you can run it on some of your older systems too.

It’s much better than Vista’s defragmentation system because:

  • It let’s you choose which drives you want to defrag.
  • It doesn’t waste your time by trying to defragment files that don’t need to be defragmented.
  • You can set it to clear temporary files before defragmenting so you don’t waste time defragmenting files that are about to be deleted.
  • It shows you a graph of what’s being defragmented (this was in earlier versions of Windows and it was really helpful so why did Microsoft scrap it?)
  • It’s relatively quick.

So yes, if you do think defragging is good but you hate Vista’s system, this is the answer.

Should you defragment your RAM? (How to guide)

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Well, everybody knows that Vista can’t really be ran on 1GB RAM – especially if you use a lot of system programs. I personally know differently, because I’ve found out that if you can “defragment” your systems RAM once the amount of available RAM falls below a certain point, you can clear up some used RAM (often quite a lot) and make your computer much more usable.

Trouble is, there isn’t much free software you can find that does the thing I want it to do. I have found one program, though, and despite the fact it doesn’t claim it will run on Windows Vista (the program was created in 2003), it will run fine without any issues.

You can grab the program here, and it is completely free (unlike most of the shareware I found on the internet). Just download the ZIP file, run the included EXE file, and when it is installed and it runs for the first time say Yes when it asks if you want to configure it.

Make sure your configuration options match mine:

ram

When that’s done, you should see it defragment in a dialog box. When it’s done, just click Send to Tray. You’ll see in the notification tray area a black box with a number in it. That is the amount of RAM available.

The system will automatically defragment the RAM when less than 1/3 of it is available. But, if you want to manually defrag it, just double click the icon.

Simple as that. You’ll get better performance and also be able to run more programs at the same time. The program will automatically load up on boot, so you won’t have to constantly reload it.

Also, the program will work on all computers from Windows 95 upwards so you can basically use it on any PC.

Enjoy, and post a comment if you have any problems.