Vista’s dumbed down disk defragmenter
March 7th, 2009 1 Comment
Disk defragmenter in Vista no longer gives you the graphical representation of a fragmented disk gradually becoming less and less fragmented. It doesn't even tell you how fragmented your disks are. Instead all you get is a message telling you that the disk is being fragmented and "This may take from a few minutes to a few hours."
This is annoying, because you have no idea where in that vague time range your defragmentation job will fall. Can you kick it off when you go for lunch and expect it to be complete by the time you get back? Or is it an overnight job? However, it's better than so many other progress messages that attempt to tell you how long you need to wait, but inevitably lie to you. For example, I've been having problems with Outlook recently. I had to kill and restart it twice today. The second time it came back it had the familiar message "The data file 'Personal Folders' was not closed properly" and a progress bar with a “seconds remaining” count.
Microsoft seconds obviously don’t work like normal seconds because after waiting for the count to work its way slowly down to "20 Seconds Remaining" I had to sit there for at least 30 seconds before it changed to 25 Seconds, then 30, then 35, then 40, then 45, then 50. From "50 seconds remaining" it took 2 mins 10 seconds before it finally finished and Outlook came to life.
If you don't know how long something's going to take, don't just make something up. And don't mislead the user into expecting something to take less time than it really will. The principle should be that software should not lie.
And don’t believe the Microsoft hype that disk defragmentation is now automated in Vista, so you don’t need to think about it any more. In fact, the Disk Defragmenter’s scheduler is set, by default, to kick off at 1.00 am every Wednesday morning. That’s fine if you leave your computer switched on every night. But if you never leave your computer on on a Tuesday night, it’ll never get defragged.
Personally, I liked the old Disk Defragmenter, with its coloured bands.
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November 5th, 2009 at 10:23 am (#)
Well, I don't agree about the seconds stuff. Indeed it is really annoying to see the remaining time increasing rather than decreasing. However, the truth is that neither you, nor the application (Outlook in your case) can for surely know the exact duration of the task performed. Nearly in all similar cases, the application starts a task, and according to it's current progress and the average progress for a given amount of time, it decides the approximate remaining time before the task completes. The degree of accuracy depends on the algorithm used to calculate the remaining time, but can also be altered if the system becomes overloaded with other tasks while executing the current (the current gets slowed down). Anyway, I don't mean that the Outlook team really used the most appropriate algorithm here, but this is a common situation for all apps that require you to wait a certain amount of time, so Outlook is not the only one.
And for the disk defragmenter - really the one in Windows XP looks better and says more. However, both deragmenters (I am sure the for XP one and I am guessing for the Vista's) lack the ability to defragment your free space (not to allow any free space between the defragmented files, which may cause fragmentation of large files that will be written to the disk after the defrag). That's why I am using TuneUp Utilities, which is an application that takes care of your PC's health. It cleans up registry, deletes unnecessary files, helps you speed up your system and has a quite good defragmenter, which reminds me the old win98 defrag by the way it displays the progress. However, the time estimated for the defragmentation is nearly as accurate as the one the Outlook displayed ;)