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Defraggler 2.16, 2.17, and 2.18 crash my Windows Vista system


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I have the most current version of Windows Vista x86 (32 bit) installed on my Dell XPS M1530, which uses a Samsung SSDR (256GB, S2, 2.5, RBAM) for a hard drive.  Ever since version 2.16 of Defraggler was released Windows crashes shortly after I try to start Defraggler.  It has gotten worse with later versions (now crashes immediately).   :angry:   Each time I have to go back and remove the current version and reinstall version 2.15, which continues to work properly as it always has.  Can anyone tell me what is causing this annoying malady and how or when a fix might be available for this error.  I have used CCleaner and Dafraggler for many years to keep all of my computers running properly.  This is the first time I have seen any kind of a problem that would cause Windows Vista to crash !!!   HELP !!!    :)   When Windows reboots it puts up some bogus message about the Raid Controller missing a driver and when I try to follow the link to the Intel fix for the problem I get an invalid page message.  It says I am missing the iaStor.sys driver but it is right there in the Windows/System32/drivers folder.  So there is no help for this problem !!! 

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were you getting the RAID controller missing message before your issue with DF version 2.16, 2.17, 2.18?

Backup now & backup often.
It's your digital life - protect it with a backup.
Three things are certain; Birth, Death and loss of data. You control the last.

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The occurence of this problem seemed to coincide with the addition of the optimize function and probably only effects laptops with SSD primary drives.  It is apparently attempting to apply Intel SSD tools to my Samsung drive. with very bad results.  I haven't seen any Windows Bluescreen crashes like this for several years now until this started happenning.   Anybody have any ideas of what might be actually happening ???            :-)    

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you may be onto something.

or it may be a Vista thing as SSD's as sole drives (laptops or not) under Win7 and 8 are getting more common so I would have thought there may have been some more complaints by now.

it may also be a conflict with iastor.sys, which you can test by not letting the service or program start via MSCONFIG.

may be worth checking for any newer versions of iastor.

 

failing all that, your fall back is obviously v2.15, unless other members have better ideas.

 

also, you can be sure your post has been read by the Dev Team who read these sort of things for any early signs of potential problems.

Backup now & backup often.
It's your digital life - protect it with a backup.
Three things are certain; Birth, Death and loss of data. You control the last.

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Thanx a lot for your thoughtful reply.   As a newbie, I just managed to read through the SSD Optimization track that you were commenting on, and maybe I should stop trying to defraggle my SSD altogether, but running the DF 2.15 does seem to help it especially if I use it sparingly and only defrag the files that the Analyze function turns up.   I did have a Dell Senior Support tech tell me that my Samsung SSD would NOT be affected by defragging and that the estimated MTBF for those drives was greater than 40 years of 7x24 use so I had stopped worrying about it.  Was he just dead wrong ???          :-)   

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Maybe not so much dead wrong and more like very optimistic.  Must have been a glass half full kind a guy.

 

It depends on whether your SSD is SLC, MLC or TLC and what you can believe from the various sources as to what each technology offers as the number of erase cycles per cell.

 

I think of the MTBF for each as 1,000,000 for SLC, 100,000 for MLC and 10,000 for TLC.

But some sources put it as low as 100,000 and 10,000 and 5,000 respectively for each.

 

So with TLC currently being very popular due to its price and if you believe 5,000 erase cycles per NAND cell, and it's the only drive in your laptop, and you consider all the background tasks Windows does with page files, hibernation, recycle bin blah blah blah then 5000 cycles/cell (I think) would not last very long at all.

 

Now in your favour, the manufactures realise this and have firmware that control wear-levelling, maintenance and assorted other functions.

Windows (Vista and above) also natively support SSD's and does things to help maintain them too.

 

But the generally accepted golden rule is NEVER defrag your SSD - or if you do want to - accept the potential for a shortened life span.

 

If you are finding the speed better after you DF your SSD then that is a bit surprising, unless it was almost full, little free space and heavily fragmented.

Surprising because SSD are just so fast even a file with hundreds of frags is still so close to being instantly accessed, it's not funny.

 

If I can get 5 years out of my SSD, I'll be very happy.

Backup now & backup often.
It's your digital life - protect it with a backup.
Three things are certain; Birth, Death and loss of data. You control the last.

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Thanks again for your insight.  I have a Samsung 250 GB SSD of their PM800 series and yes it is almost full (70-80% depending on accumulated Restore Points).   But I have no idea whether that is an SLC, MLC, or TLC and I wouldn't know how to find out.   All I know is I have been running this machine for 6 years doind defrags once a week and it is still going strong.   The DF >2.15 crashes are the first I have seen in many years and my worst problem has been trying to keep the Windows Vista generated garbage from over-running my now meager drive capacity.  It seemed like plenty when I bought the machine, but now It seems like a Terrabyte is what you need to cope with the latest series of bloated blivotware.  If you know how to tell what flavor my SSD is I can plan to transition it to something else before I start getting failures.  I am using a Synology dual 2TB network drive to back-up all critical files on all my machines on a daily basis.but I always worry that Murphy will get me somehow anyway.  I appreciate any advice you might have for what is a reasonable strategy for going forward.         :-)     :)        Thank-you again for all your help !!!  

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Did a quick web search, found this; http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Samsung-PM800-256GB-SSD.38444.0.html

So it appears the PM800 uses MLC SSD's, which probably explains your 6 year life with heavy usage and DF's.

 

Also, SSD's seem to like, something in the order of 25%, free space to 'do their thang'.

 

If it was mine, I would be turning off the restore points, yes you lose their small but potential life saving capabilities but gain (hopefully) a lot of space.

Also, again (me personally) I would be making the pagefile 512 min and 4096 max - you'll find it hardly ever goes above 512.  in fact I did that to mine after advice from this forum, kept an eye (still do occasionally) on it and never see it go above 512meg.

 

also consider turning of hibernation, saving another gig or so space with "powercfg -h off" from the command line prompt.

 

You are already doing your backups - bloody excellent - I see so many who don't, so turning off whatever you are comfortable with to reclaim some space shouldn't expose you too much.  also consider doing an image backup of your drive to the NAS if you aren't.  Can recommend Macrium Reflect (free) for that.

 

And lastly if you are considering upgrading the size of the SSD, I'd get off Vista too.

My only beef with Vista was its very poor performance and need for lots of memory, but since you have always had the SSD, that may never have been an issue for you. :D

Backup now & backup often.
It's your digital life - protect it with a backup.
Three things are certain; Birth, Death and loss of data. You control the last.

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Thank you so much for the great advice.  So I did some major clean-ups and eliminated the Norton 360 Back-ups that had grown to 37 GB of disk space and turned them off.  I also purged out all but the latest restore point using CCleaner and eliminated a few excess Outlook PST Archives and found I now have 45% Freespace so that seems to have made everything work better.  I will also adjust my weekly maintenance schedule to avoid doing DF on my SSD. 

 

I would still like to see Piriform fix whatever it is in their latest versions of DF that is causing Vista SP2 to crash because I think it is still useful for keeping track of what is taking up space and/or disorganizing your SSD even if you never do any defrags at all.   So I will keep checking to see if newer versions will finally fix the bug that is causing the crashes.  I do have Windows 7 on 2 of my later machines but they both seem to require much more disk storage space and they both have regular disk drives so they don't have the problem.  I have never liked Vista because it has lots of weird problems but I have resigned myself to leave it as is until it is time to replace the machine with something that has a much larger disk (~1 TB or more) and runs the latest stable version of Windows.  At least I have learned all the tricks for how to live with it for now and I'm sure its days are numbered at this point.  It's just a case of the devil you know feels safer than the devil you don't.          :wacko:  

 

So thank-you again for all your help and support !!!       :D

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you may be stuck with Vista longer than you think.

 

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/lifecycle

 

it's already out of mainstream support but has 3 years left of extended support.

 

as you say, I think your PC will die first.

 

and a belated welcome to the forum. :)

Backup now & backup often.
It's your digital life - protect it with a backup.
Three things are certain; Birth, Death and loss of data. You control the last.

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  • 1 year later...

I have the same issue with Defraggler since version 2.16 (program hangs for many seconds with each mouse click in GUI, after which it seems to revalidate drives)...

 

PC Model: DELL Inspiron 1720

 

OS: Windows Vista 32-bit SP2

HDD: Samsung SSD 840 EVO 256GB

 

Debug log from running latest Defraggler (2.19.982) in attachments, suspicious entries listed below:

...
[2015-04-17] [15:46:50.565] 007a4 1 CVolumeManagerBase::UpdateVolume#340 Start update for volume \\?\VOLUME{xyz}.
[2015-04-17] [15:47:00.034] 01604 1 SsdOptimizer::TriggerTrim#185 Entering SsdOptimizer::TriggerTrim
...
[2015-04-17] [15:49:20.237] 01604 1 SsdOptimizer::ValidateVolume#140 Entering SsdOptimizer::ValidateVolume
[2015-04-17] [15:49:40.147] 01604 1 SsdOptimizer::TriggerTrim#185 Entering SsdOptimizer::TriggerTrim
[2015-04-17] [15:49:40.254] 01604 1 SsdOptimizer::TriggerTrim#185 Leaving SsdOptimizer::TriggerTrim
[2015-04-17] [15:49:40.254] 01604 1 SsdOptimizer::ValidateVolume#140 Leaving SsdOptimizer::ValidateVolume
[2015-04-17] [15:49:54.547] 01604 1 CMainFrame::OnDestroy#965 Entering CMainFrame::OnDestroy
...
P.S. In my opinion the easiest fix would be disabling 'SSD Optimizer' on everything lower than Win 7 (missing SSD Trim support)

Defraggler.exe.2_19_982debug2015-04-17_15-46.txt

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I would be making the pagefile 512 min and 4096 max - you'll find it hardly ever goes above 512.  in fact I did that to mine after advice from this forum, kept an eye (still do occasionally) on it and never see it go above 512meg.

 

currently allocated memory = recommended... why is so much space reserved for the page file (4 GB) on lap with 8GB RAM?

 

eb81b9-1433692519.jpg

Versions of CCleaner Cloud; Introduction Ccleaner Cloud;

Ccleaner-->System-Requirements; Ccleaner FAQ´s; Ccleaner builds; Scheduling Ccleaner Free

 

Es ist möglich, keine Fehler zu machen und dennoch zu verlieren. Das ist kein Zeichen von Schwäche. Das ist das Leben -> "Picard"

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I now have not read everything, but understood when flying over that you used an SSD.

 

for ssd you dont need defrag necessarily. ssd is fast and no rotating parts as hdd. the access times on each cell should work relatively the same speed

 

try this option...uncheck this arrow

 

e6af9b-1433693319.jpg

 

but with this option your SSD is of course no longer displayed in Defraggler.

Versions of CCleaner Cloud; Introduction Ccleaner Cloud;

Ccleaner-->System-Requirements; Ccleaner FAQ´s; Ccleaner builds; Scheduling Ccleaner Free

 

Es ist möglich, keine Fehler zu machen und dennoch zu verlieren. Das ist kein Zeichen von Schwäche. Das ist das Leben -> "Picard"

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Debug log from running latest Defraggler (2.19.982) in attachments, suspicious entries listed below:

...
[2015-04-17] [15:46:50.565] 007a4 1 CVolumeManagerBase::UpdateVolume#340 Start update for volume \\?\VOLUME{xyz}.
[2015-04-17] [15:47:00.034] 01604 1 SsdOptimizer::TriggerTrim#185 Entering SsdOptimizer::TriggerTrim
...
[2015-04-17] [15:49:20.237] 01604 1 SsdOptimizer::ValidateVolume#140 Entering SsdOptimizer::ValidateVolume
[2015-04-17] [15:49:40.147] 01604 1 SsdOptimizer::TriggerTrim#185 Entering SsdOptimizer::TriggerTrim
[2015-04-17] [15:49:40.254] 01604 1 SsdOptimizer::TriggerTrim#185 Leaving SsdOptimizer::TriggerTrim
[2015-04-17] [15:49:40.254] 01604 1 SsdOptimizer::ValidateVolume#140 Leaving SsdOptimizer::ValidateVolume
[2015-04-17] [15:49:54.547] 01604 1 CMainFrame::OnDestroy#965 Entering CMainFrame::OnDestroy
...
P.S. In my opinion the easiest fix would be disabling 'SSD Optimizer' on everything lower than Win 7 (missing SSD Trim support)

 

 

Thanks @meloniq, that will give the Devs something to work with.

Backup now & backup often.
It's your digital life - protect it with a backup.
Three things are certain; Birth, Death and loss of data. You control the last.

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