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Defraggler using Vista.


bravofan71

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My friend ran a defrag on his computer that has Vista. He's had the computer for a month now. He doesn't have big files on it. No games,music e.t.c. He said that he ran it for 1 1/2 hours and it was only at 34%. Does it defrag slower with Vista? I have been using Defraggler for a while now,and my defrag time was about 8 minutes! My son's computer has a lot of songs that are on Itunes,and his took only 21 minutes. We have XP though. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks..

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Sadly, I too have had the same problem. I searched the boards here and see quite a few postings dealing with exactly the same issue. I have a feeling that Defraggler is not quite ready for the Vista environment. That is too bad as it is a good product that I have relied on for over a year. I suggest you try Auslogics defragger (see Cnet downloads). I ran it on my computer with a Vista 64 bit environment with no problem. It is also much faster than defraggler.

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No problems in Vista 64 here.

 

You might want to check which files Defraggler detects as fragmented, because the System Restore files (stored in C:\System Volume Information) often get fragmented and are quite large, which means longer defrag time.

 

Also, it's worth mentioning that computer hardware differs greatly, and your Vista hard drive might be slower. Vista Pre-SP1 also has some disk I/O issues so make sure you're updated on that, too.

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I have noticed some issues with running Defraggler under Vista as well. Most notably the following:

 

1) Loss of free space after defrag (Due to system restore information). This is a Windows issue, but as I have noticed that Defraggler is marked by Vista as being potentially unsafe and CCleaner is not, I wonder if there is something that Piriform can do about this...

 

2) Slow defragmenting. This is much faster under XP.

 

3) After defragmentation the drive map doesn't always look optimized. I'm not sure what causes this, but under XP things usually look better than under Vista.

 

All in all it's really a great program. I love it. I have it running on all of our office equipment, and recommend it to everyone. I hope some of these Vista quirks can be resolved though, as the adoption of Vista and Windows 7 which is based on it is only going to increase...

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No problems here on Vista Ultimate 32 bit. If anything, it doesn't take care of the hiberfile.sys firle if you put it into hibernate.

 

AJ

 

Yeah, the hiberfile.sys is generally in use so it can't be defragged. Same with the pagefile.sys. For those looking to defrag these files, you can use the sysinternals pagedefrag which runs at startup (Once you've set it to do so). You really should only need to do this once, as the files don't generally get very fragmented (Not a whole lot of writing operations going on there).

 

Here's SysInternal's page on Microsoft's site:

 

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx

 

Hope that helps...

 

As for the issues under Vista, perhaps a future version will resolve this. I will try 1.06 on my Vista install once I get the machine back from Dell...

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When switching your defrag tool to another expect the very first full defragmentation to take a long time, in some cases a very long time - this is rather normal. Subsequent defrags afterwards should however go much faster. Also antivirus software with active real-time protection can drastically slow down the whole process.

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When switching your defrag tool to another expect the very first full defragmentation to take a long time, in some cases a very long time - this is rather normal. Subsequent defrags afterwards should however go much faster. Also antivirus software with active real-time protection can drastically slow down the whole process.

 

Yes, I do understand that. Under Vista though it just doesn't seem to ever speed up as it does under XP. XP is pretty fast to defrag on anything that isn't underpowered, but on Vista, even on powerful machines the defrag runs slowly. This does not really seem to be impacted (At least in my experience) on running Defraggler multiple times. My computer has an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5 Ghz processor with 4 GB's of RAM and if I set Defraggler to run before I go to bed and wake up in the morning it is still not done. In fact, it is usually somewhere in the 30% area. Additionally, the (very well documented) Restore Point issue under Vista I think also adds to the lengthy scan times. With larger hard drives the amount of space allocated to Restore Points can be quite large, so the more Defraggler runs, the more Restore Point data it has to move around and manipulate (Though it can't defrag these files).

 

I realize that the Restore Point issue is a Windows Vista thing, but I have noticed that Windows Vista "flags" Defraggler as being a potential issue, but does not flag CCleaner. This perplexes me a bit. To Windows they should just be two .exe's... What is handled differently in the install for Defraggler that CCleaner's installer doesn't do, or does differently? This is why I think that there must be a way around this issue with Windows Vista. Because the Vista Defragmentation Tool (Though horrid) doesn't create these Restore Points, so there must be some sort of approach / call that bypasses the excessive Restore Point creation.

 

I'm not sure what can be done for speed... The Windows Vista Defragmentation Tool isn't fast either, but it is faster than Defraggler (At least in my experience). Of course, having run the Windows Vista Defragmentation Tool I'm not convinced that it actually does anything... LOL That sets Defraggler apart from the built in tools...

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Yes, I do understand that. Under Vista though it just doesn't seem to ever speed up as it does under XP. XP is pretty fast to defrag on anything that isn't underpowered, but on Vista, even on powerful machines the defrag runs slowly. This does not really seem to be impacted (At least in my experience) on running Defraggler multiple times. My computer has an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5 Ghz processor with 4 GB's of RAM and if I set Defraggler to run before I go to bed and wake up in the morning it is still not done. In fact, it is usually somewhere in the 30% area. Additionally, the (very well documented) Restore Point issue under Vista I think also adds to the lengthy scan times. With larger hard drives the amount of space allocated to Restore Points can be quite large, so the more Defraggler runs, the more Restore Point data it has to move around and manipulate (Though it can't defrag these files).

 

I realize that the Restore Point issue is a Windows Vista thing, but I have noticed that Windows Vista "flags" Defraggler as being a potential issue, but does not flag CCleaner. This perplexes me a bit. To Windows they should just be two .exe's... What is handled differently in the install for Defraggler that CCleaner's installer doesn't do, or does differently? This is why I think that there must be a way around this issue with Windows Vista. Because the Vista Defragmentation Tool (Though horrid) doesn't create these Restore Points, so there must be some sort of approach / call that bypasses the excessive Restore Point creation.

 

I'm not sure what can be done for speed... The Windows Vista Defragmentation Tool isn't fast either, but it is faster than Defraggler (At least in my experience). Of course, having run the Windows Vista Defragmentation Tool I'm not convinced that it actually does anything... LOL That sets Defraggler apart from the built in tools...

 

Here is a suggestion for Vista users for a more efficient and speedy defragging with Defraggler:

 

First I would only suggest this to users of Defraggler who backup there registry with ERUNT or have a stable running computer so that they can disable and re-enable system restore since this will help.

 

1. If you are sure your computer has been running ok for several days disable system restore.

2. Defrag empty space (allow fragments)

3. Than analyze your drive and defrag the files that need to be defragged since defragging empty space (allow fragments) will creat some files to be fragmented.

4. Now go back and re-enable system restore and make a new restore point.

 

Note: This may still take some time but since system restore is disabled it will not shrink your free space and will not take as long.

But keep in mind this will still take some time for the first time but since you don't need to defrag your full drive all the times you can just defrag files after analyzing your drive like in step 3. This will be fast since only files that are needed to be defragged will be defragged and will also keep your system performance in shape.

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Here is a suggestion for Vista users for a more efficient and speedy defragging with Defraggler:

 

First I would only suggest this to users of Defraggler who backup there registry with ERUNT or have a stable running computer so that they can disable and re-enable system restore since this will help.

 

1. If you are sure your computer has been running ok for several days disable system restore.

2. Defrag empty space (allow fragments)

3. Than analyze your drive and defrag the files that need to be defragged since defragging empty space (allow fragments) will creat some files to be fragmented.

4. Now go back and re-enable system restore and make a new restore point.

 

Note: This may still take some time but since system restore is disabled it will not shrink your free space and will not take as long.

But keep in mind this will still take some time for the first time but since you don't need to defrag your full drive all the times you can just defrag files after analyzing your drive like in step 3. This will be fast since only files that are needed to be defragged will be defragged and will also keep your system performance in shape.

 

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll give that a try once I get my computer back from Dell... :)

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I have noticed some issues with running Defraggler under Vista as well. Most notably the following:

 

1) Loss of free space after defrag (Due to system restore information). This is a Windows issue, but as I have noticed that Defraggler is marked by Vista as being potentially unsafe and CCleaner is not, I wonder if there is something that Piriform can do about this...

 

2) Slow defragmenting. This is much faster under XP.

 

3) After defragmentation the drive map doesn't always look optimized. I'm not sure what causes this, but under XP things usually look better than under Vista.

 

All in all it's really a great program. I love it. I have it running on all of our office equipment, and recommend it to everyone. I hope some of these Vista quirks can be resolved though, as the adoption of Vista and Windows 7 which is based on it is only going to increase...

I agree, defraggler runs much better in XP and I can defragment down to zero files.

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Hello,

 

I'm running a fairly fast machine for calculus and stats -not gaming- (Quad 3Mhz + 8 Gb RAM at 1033Khz on an ROG motherboard) under vista 64 and RAID 5 with 1.5 Tb total space of which 25% are used for the moment.

 

I began running defraggler on wednesday Feb 4th evening and... still running it 4 days later... I stopped yesterday morning for half an hour, updated and got back on letting the machine complete the task. I stopped the task once more for work purpposes yesterday afternoon, and got it back to defrag once more. It's defragging as I write on "normal" setting.

 

What I've noticed:

 

1. Defraggler works rather rapidly during the first 20 minutes or so. Then drops to very slow (what appears to be 20 files per second using average 25% cpu on all 4 cores with 35% peaks).

 

2. Total file size has increased, according to already documented vista restore files issue, but not that much. Anyhow, MS suggests one should keep 1/5th of total drive space free for "headroom" especially with smaller HDDs.

 

3. For the first defrag, I had about 850 defragged files and about 2000 fragments. I updated at 39% of the task. After update and hardware restart, I had around 500 files and 1600 fragments to start with. I had to run some calculus simulations, so I stopped defraggler at 29%. When I was through, I did a hardware restart, and put defraggler back on the job. The app came up with 240 fragged files (155.5 Gb) and about 1400 fragments. It's been running for 15 hours this time. It's at 36%defrag and has 174 files, 589 fragments, and 155.1 Gb left!!

 

4. Files were originally situated in the middle of the "map" and are in the process of being moved to the beggining. I now have a nice solid blue line at the top, and a very appealing bright red middle. Which would tend to explain the slow defrag speed, since defraggler is having to cope with RAID-5 redundancy when moving all of the data contained in the files from one place to another on the disks.

 

5. Moving the files around this way, naturally increases fragments during the defrag process and makes rebooting a bit longer than usual, yet remains within the "bearable" limits of less than 3 minutes (for a machine such as this one). I'm happy with 5 minutes for my laptop.

 

6. Other than the issue of increased boot time, nothing to say on the RAID-5 side of things, for the moment.

 

7. I checked the defrag with Tune-Up and found that the mapped "red" files were all blocked and only the "blue" files were available for defrag. The MS Vista onboard defrag tool does not provide a visual, so canot tell. This would tend to say that while Defraggler has not finished, the files defragged by defraggler are blocked, which is OK if you are going to continue defragging with Defraggler, but could cause an issue if you run into heavy waters, and should Vista need to move these files around (if they are also blocked for Vista). We'll see what happens once the job has been completed.

 

(Yes, I'm a backup maniac)

 

I do hope that as the process goes over the critical defrag/rewrite point, things will speed up. I would expect this point to be located somewhere around the 65% to 70% defrag mark... and in about 3 more days...

 

IF Defraggler moves files around only once, then subsequent defragging experiences should be noticeable shorter in time.

 

Perhaps an option, and otherwise a warning, should be posted about the data re-arrangement time consequences (and the need to run a full backup before defragging). I did not see anything on this issue in pirifom.doc, nor any of the Piriform forums I consulted. I may have missread. Please correct me if I have.

 

Hoping these lines help.

 

Douweiqiang.

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