http://www.itauthor.com/2009/03/07/vistas-dumbed-down-disk-defragmenter/ Stuff about technical writing and software Sat, 04 Feb 2012 23:42:54 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://www.itauthor.com/2009/03/07/vistas-dumbed-down-disk-defragmenter/comment-page-1/#comment-7106 Ivaylo Slavov Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:23:28 +0000 http://www.itauthor.com/2009/03/07/vista-disk-defragmenter/#comment-7106 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 ;) 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 ;)

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