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.