Microsoft Moves Forward With Windows 7, Still Includes Underwhelming Disk Defrag

Though Windows 7 is a very big step in bringing the operating system into the 21st century in some ways, in others it seems horrendously stuck in the past. The defragment routines included with Windows 7 don’t look, or act, so differently from those first licensed by Microsoft from Symantec (Norton disk defragger called Speeddisk) long ago, which was a dumbed down version of the Norton full product.

There are lots of defragmenting programs, many of which are of dubious efficacy. Microsoft has, however, a better defragmentation program, thanks to the buying of the Winternals site, and folding the Sysinternals utilities into its stable of code. An article from the Digital Inspiration website tells us about the second method that Microsoft offers, and though it is not glamorous, it is very effective.

One of the reasons why your computer may become slow over time is because the files on the hard drive can become fragmented. Now what’s that?

Disk Fragmentation for Non-Techies

As you start filling your hard-drive with new programs, documents, and other files, the operating system tries to find vacant places on the hard-drive to place these files. Like an artist who breaks a tile into multiple pieces to form a mosaic, your computer will break these file into chunks (or fragments) and store them in different places across your hard drive.

When you load a program or open a file, the computer will have to first assemble these “fragmented” pieces thus decreasing the performance. And fragmentation is not just an issue with your computer’s hard disk but even removable devices like the USB Flash Drive or your external drives can also become fragmented with time.

Alternate Windows Disk Defragmenter from Microsoft

A Disk Defragmenter program helps because it will pre-arrange all the “fragmented” pieces of a file close together thus reducing the time it takes to open files or load programs on your computer.

Now almost every version of Windows includes a disk defragmenter utility but the problem with these built-in tools is that that will defragment the entire hard-drive at once and they’ll ignore files that are smaller than 64 MB. Luckily, Microsoft offers another free but lesser-known utility called Contig (short for contiguous) that lets you have more control over the defragmentation process.

What’s unique about Contig is that it lets you defragment individual files, folders, or the entire hard drive. You can run Contig from the command prompt but if that sounds a bit technical, you can also look at Power Defragmenter – an easy and more visual interface for Contig.

Using Power Defragmenter, you can visually select files, folders, or the drive you wish to defragment, and Power Defragmenter will internally use Contig to perform the defragmentation process. You may use Contig on machines running Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

For instance, if I were to defragment all the documents on my disk and none of the other files, the command* will be:

Contig.exe -v -s c:\Users\labnol\Documents\*.*

[*] You’ll need to run the utility as an administrator as it will throw an “Access denied” error.

And here’s a detailed output of a standard Contig command that tells you exactly what happens behind the scenes per file.

Unlike other third-party defragmentation tools, Contig uses Windows’ internal defragmentation APIs so it won’t cause disk corruption, even if you terminate the program while its running.

Please note, however, that defragmentation is only recommended for traditional hard drives; computers using newer flash memory based solid-state drives should not use traditional defragmenters.  Even though file fragmentation may occur on these drives, it should not impact performance due to the nature of flash memory.  Additionally, defragmentation may actually decrease the life of a solid-state drive; however, they cannot cause this on a traditional platter-based hard drive.

While Contig, from a command line, or using the Windows interface might be a choice for some, there is another choice, for the clever user, that is both effective and free. It also gains features and power with each iteration.

In its current iteration, Auslogics Disk Defrag does an excellent job of defragmenting files on any of the modern Windows operating systems, from Windows 2000 (which is not explicitly specified) through Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, all 32 and 64 bit versions.

From the Auslogics website -

What’s new in Disk Defrag 3?

Auslogics Disk Defrag is not just a defragmenter any more, but a fully featured disk optimizer. And with all the advanced techniques of disk optimization it has, Disk Defrag 3 remains extremely compact and even easier to use!

Free space consolidation

Free space on a disk is often split into many small gaps between files. Windows fills these gaps with newly created or extended files. The more fragmented the free space is, the more fragmented new files will be. Disk Defrag merges free space into a large contiguous block. This technology dramatically slows further files fragmentation and speeds up disk access.

System files smart placement

Commonly used by Windows, system files may be scattered all over the disk and intermixed with data files. Disk Defrag 3 arranges system files by defragmenting and moving them to the faster part of the disk. This minimizes the time needed for HDD to access system files improving overall computer performance.

Keeping the MFT Reserved Zone Clear

Normally, NTFS file system reserves about 12.5% of the disk volume for the MFT records (a place where information about every file and directory is stored). However, when the rest of the disk space is getting low, the MFT Reserved Zone will be used for storing regular files. This may lead to MFT fragmentation.

Disk Defrag 3 replaces regular files from the MFT Reserved Zone into the rest of the disk space, allowing NTFS to allocate contiguous space for the MFT records and thus to prevent its fragmentation.

Auslogics Disk Defrag [+]

Enhanced user interface

A redesigned user interface makes navigation through Disk Defrag 3 more intuitive than ever before. It can be integrated into the Windows Explorer context menu and minimized to system tray on close. Use its many new customization settings to simplify defragmentation process.

List of fragmented files

Disk Defrag 3 lists all the fragmented files after performing disk analysis. Selecting any file from the list will highlight its clusters location on a fragmentation map. You can find the most fragmented files and their paths by sorting the list. Right-click on any file directly in the list to defragment it.

Why use Auslogics Disk Defrag 3?

Disk Defrag 3 is FREE for home users, yet includes advanced techniques of disk optimization that only paid analogs have. This allows Disk Defrag 3 to stand out from its major competitors as the most efficient disk defragmenter.

What is developing is a small company has been steadily improving a program that has 85%-90% of the power of Executive’s Diskeeper software, yet is totally free for home use (this includes if you have a home server running any version of Windows Server – something that will cause other free for home use products to balk – many of the others do a version test before start up, and any Server version is considered professional, and therefore not a home user situation. Bummer!).

Auslogics Disk Defrag is powerful, beautiful (very customizable interface), and safe. What more could you want? ( Yes, there is also a method of having it do disk monitoring and unattended optimization!)

So what you now have is 3 ways of doing advanced disk defragmentation, all with none of the annoyances of the standard Windows routines. And nothing out of pocket!

Live long and prosper!

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