Hardware

Ask something
Discussion Locked

Vista vs. XP defrag utility

0 helpful
17 replies

by chatch1

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

Today, after switching out my broken cd drive with a new one, i tested it by trying to boot with UBCD4win. Out of curiosity, i opened the XP defrag utility and analyzed my Vista partition with it. The partition is freshly defragged with Vista's utility. The report came back as 30% fragmented... and took a couple hours to finish(most time was spent "compacting files").

Result: the notebook boot time(power on until the hard drive stops working constantly because of superfetch) went down from 11 minutes to just over 3 minutes, and the performance of Vista is almost as fast as when i bought the notebook a year ago. What is the deal with Vista's defrag utility?

17 replies

by oz_media

What the heck are you running it on that would take 11 mins to boot? soud slike a really screwed up file system.

As for defrags, I don't trust any Windows defrag utilities, I always go for third party utilities that seem to be more creative in how they manage the disk.

As for your example, I've seen the same with Win2K, where the Win2K defrag beat out the XP defrag as far as cleaning free space and compressing data is concerned. In fact I remember defragging XP havign it show as completely defragged and then running it again and it showing over 20% fragmentation, without using any files in the meantime.

Don' ttrust what they say, just use what works, again I recommend third party utilities, there are lots of them that do a grat job, I find with Vista though that it stays relatively defragged as it is an automatic/built-in feature to defrag on the fly, which sometimes slows performance if your box wasn't designed for Vista too.

by hal 9000

I had a ASUS NB here last week that was running Vista Business 32 Bit from new so it was designed for it most defiantly but it took 25 minutes to restart.

It was driving me crazy it was just so [b]SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW[/b] When I asked the guy who owned it if he was happy with it his first comment was I wanted to load XP right? I just said No I want to add more RAM to this as it doesn't have anywhere near enough. I upped it to 4 GIG and the thing wasn't the same system after that one change. It now takes 2 Minutes to restart.

The crowd who made this just didn't install anywhere enough RAM to run Vista properly, on a NB that was designed for this OS. Something I've seen quite a lot of with [b]Off The Shelf Systems[/b] they will work but just and they need to be upgraded from new to be usable.

Col

by oz_media

That's why I started by asking what he was running, as this is common for Vista "Capable" noteooks. It was teh sticker campaign that resulted in a failed class action suit.

You might remember that last year we had a discussion regarding Vista Capable stickers and how they were trying to have it seen as a class action suit; it was quite a debate actually.

In February '08 it was accepted as a class action suit and the forum went silly with it. It was obviously to be tried under strict limitations, limitations that would have lost the main plaintiff's case, which all other cases would be based on.

Well just last month another judge decided to throw it out as class action and said that the initial plaintiff would have to go on his own.

Point is, they made clear guidelines as to what Capable and Ready meant.

Many notebooks were sold to be Capable, and this just means they car run teh core Vista OS for the advantages of up to date security, and the basic file system. It does not say it would run well and in fact indicates that to get the full use and benefit from Vista, you would need to upgrade hardware.

Fortunately it is most common to see minimum 3GB notebooks on the shelf with new Vista notebooks with the better retail models having at least 4GB as well as better graphics cards and multicore processors.

It was bordeline deception but as always with a company like Microsoft, you always have to dig deep beyond their marketing efforts when sussing them up.

by guru of d0s

Well, ever since the demise of Windows 98, Microsoft's defrag, er, doesn't!! Apart from non-moveable system files...98's defrag could shove all the free space up one end of the disk...XP onwards just can't....and what's with the boring bars with the stupid pixel-wide lines....give us back the old fill screen rolling defrag with one box per cluster :o)

Damn.....it's good to be back!!!!

by dumphrey

defrag utility is a striped down, watered down version of diskeeper. I haven't looked at the Vista defrag utility, but I would bet its diskeeper as well. Limitations on the defrag utility probably reflect licensing costs.

If they were more full featured, you would not need to purchase a third party product suck as Diskeeper...

by hal 9000

Just whatever you do do not make any mention of the TR Meeting coming up some people will try to get you to attend no matter what. ;)

[i]I officially announced TechRepublic?s Community Event that will be held in Louisville, Kentucky, on Friday, June 26, 2009.[/i]

Listing here

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tr-out-loud/?p=361

Cheers

Col

by oz_media

Bangs head on desk, wakes up in a stupor several days later and wonders, sh*t was that GoD?

Wow, talk about a hiatus! I am eager to hear what's changed, PM me!

Oh, and welcome back its great to hear from you again!

by seanferd

Wow, yeah, I'm with Oz here: what the heck causes such long boot times in the first place?

As to why the XP defrag did more: It was because you did it offline - Vista was not running. So defrag could then affect otherwise locked and unmovable files; possibly the boot files organization has improved, and quite likely the swap file was nicely defragmented.

For a quicker defrag, you can always delete (set to none) the swapfile, then recreate it (immediately).

by chatch1

I use this as a desktop, and i use it for web/application development, so i have local replicas of SQL databases for testing etc. running. It has about 117 processes running after startup...1.7gb ram used(out of 3).

I think both of you are correct about the partition not being locked by Vista. The fragmented files were probably system files that couldnt be moved unless you were running a separate OS.

by hal 9000

Any Defrag App would have managed to do the same when run without the OS being loaded.

Any OS Locks Files that where never placed in the right place on the HDD to begin with so you are stuck with slower Performance that you should have.

Col

by seanferd

For a normal Vista defrag maybe just log in under another account that doesn't have all the extra processes/services running.

3 minutes for that startup probably is not too bad, really.

by seanferd

Or have you just given up since you've gotten those two extra thumbs? (Even though it's been a while already.) :D

Of course, it really isn't a Question question, but you could form bad habits this way.

Edited for shocked vs laughing (although I suppose one is as good as the other here).

by oh smeg

TR is misbehaving like there is no tomorrow so I no longer care.

Like for instance I logged in this time and it showed that I was logged in but when I went to Post a Reply I was prompted to Log In.

Then other times I'm logged in as Smeggy and the next time I post a reply it comes up as HAL again so I have finally come to the conclusion that TR is out to get me so I don't bother any more. :(

Must be JD's ShowTunes or the fact that he's now asking questions about Novel has overloaded the servers and they is Broke. :^0

Lets see which Account comes up this time as it doesn't appear to matter which User Name & Password I use TR just choses what they want me logged in as and there is no way around it. :-&

Col 0:-)

by vindasel

Vista's defragger excludes fragments larger than 64MB by default, so even if the vista defragger reports a fully defragmented disk, there could actually be large fragments present. XP's defragger reports all the fragments IIRC.

Get something like Diskeeper 2009 pro for defragging if you want fast and good results. It will defrag in a fraction of the time it takes the windows utilities, and yet do a far better job.

And, yes, 11 minutes is way too long for bootup; heck, even 3 mins is too long :)

Also, disable superfetch; despite all the hype, I found it to be totally useless.

by acavasin

Warning: This is from the desk of a(n) (obviously) technological nincompoop. I have a brand new HP Dv6z with Vista Ultimate, 500 g HD & 8 g of RAM. It worked remarkably well until about 2 months ago when I had our tech group send a guy in to hook me up to our business network. From that point on it's been a swift descent into laptop hell; one thing after another. It now takes an easy 15 minutes to boot and it's driving me nuts. I've had the tech group back several times for head-scratching, chin rubbing sessions, but the patient is still dying. Are there any suggestions besides boat anchor?

This discussion is closed to new replies.