Tech: How to Defrag in Windows Vista

Hey, one of our very rare TECH articles. I think we post so little about tech because we deal with it all day so we tend to avoid blogging about it!

Last night I wanted to find out whether my gaming machine required defragging. Are you now wondering what “defragging” is? If you are the best way I can explain it is that over time your computer files get stored all over your hard drive, mostly in bits. The more bits, the more work the computer has to do when you want to use the file. Defragmenting (or defragging) your hard drive collects all (well most) of the bits and sticks them back together thus speeding up the time the computer takes to access them. It’s a good thing to run!

My desktop runs Windows Vista Ultimate so I was expecting a decent “pro” defragging tool. No chance! Just the bog standard Vista defrag utility. The easiest way to find it is bring up the Start menu and type “defrag”, the link to Disk Defragmenter will appear.

Now, I don’t leave the machine on 24/7 so an early morning scheduled defrag was no good to me. I clicked the “Defragment now” button but nothing seemed to happen. What about my 3 drives? Where were my statistics??

It seems Microsoft in their “wisdom” has decided to dumb-down the defrag interface and remove some of the tools you may have been used to in Windows XP. Don’t worry though, the functionality is still there. The key is to run it from the command prompt.

How to defrag your drives in Windows Vista

1. Open a Command Prompt as Administrator .
   Go to Start – All Programs – Accessories, right click on the Command Prompt and choose “Run as administrator”. Obviously you need admin privileges to do this.
2. Type the following see how much your hard drive is fragmented (in this example, your C drive):
   defrag c: -a
3. Vista will tell you a “Percent file fragmentation” and, at the bottom, if you need to defragment the drive or not.
4. To fully defragment your C drive type the following:
   defrag c: -w
5. Give it time to run (best to leave the computer alone) and then you’re done!

More Advanced Defrag Options

Obviously there are more command line parameters you can specify to output more info, defrag all drives, just defrag fragments smaller than 64Mb, etc. To get help just type:
defrag /?

To help you out here is the output:

Description: Locates and consolidates fragmented files on local volumes to improve system performance.

Syntax:
defrag <volume> -a [-v]
defrag <volume> [{-r | -w}] [-f] [-v]
defrag -c [{-r | -w}] [-f] [-v]

Parameters:

Value Description

<volume> Specifies the drive letter or mount point path of the volume to
be defragmented or analyzed.

-c Defragments all volumes on this computer.

-a Performs fragmentation analysis only.

-r Performs partial defragmentation (default). Attempts to
consolidate only fragments smaller than 64 megabytes (MB).

-w Performs full defragmentation. Attempts to consolidate all file
fragments, regardless of their size.

-f Forces defragmentation of the volume when free space is low.

-v Specifies verbose mode. The defragmentation and analysis output
is more detailed.

-? Displays this help information.

Examples:

defrag d:
defrag d:\vol\mountpoint -w -f
defrag d: -a -v
defrag -c -v

So last night I did the following.

1. Checked the fragmentation of my three drives with extra detailed output:
   defrag c: -a -v
   defrag e: -a -v
   defrag f: -a -v
2. As it turned out only drives E and F were fragmented so I fully defragged them and outputted the results to a text file:
   defrag e: -w -v > c:\temp\defrag_e_300108.txt
   defrag f: -w -v > c:\temp\defrag_f_300108.txt
3. I therefore now have two text files with the output of my defrags so I can keep track of what I did when.

I hope this helps some of you out. I know I’ve skipped a bit of the detail but I think the basics are covered. Let me know what you think in the comments. Did this help you out? Do I need to change anything? If we helped you out and you want to say thanks you can always buy something at Amazon UK through our Shop link at the top of this page or you can always bung us a few £ or $ or € via paypal to our email address:

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