12 Responses

1. Arcestaff

   June 23rd, 2007 at 7:21 am

   1

   Lol…the vista defragger is really dumbed down. I didn’t even bother after my first encounter with it. I got Diskeeper Pro, ran a manual defrag once with all the optimization options enabled, and have since left it on the auto defrag mode. Works like a charm. The user interface and options for defragging are light years ahead of the vista defrag ‘utility’. I don’t know why MS made theirs so nasty and a pain to use, that too in their ‘new’ OS! It’s a step backward from the XP defragger. I’ve also heard that it takes way too long to defrag a drive compared to the third party defraggers like Diskeeper.

2. A Tentative Personal Finance Blog

   June 23rd, 2007 at 8:50 am

   2

   How’d you lose a gig of space? It’s not even that bad though, in the world of terabyte hard drives.

3. Alex

   June 23rd, 2007 at 4:46 pm

   3

   @Arcestaff: Dumb and dumber I guess. I’m thinking of getting me O&O Defrag Pro. I’ve used it in the office before and I really loved it. It might be worth the $40+ instead of sticking with Vista’s default dumb bastard.

   @A Tentative Personal Finance Blog: I don’t know. I checked everything. My page files, temporary folders and wasn’t able to locate the missing gig. My laptop’s with a 120GB drive so I guess the gig’s still worth a bit.

   I got it back, though, and you might want to know how. I pasted a file into that drive and voila! The disk space came back up. I guess it’s with the defrag moving files and Vista can’t even properly count free space anymore. Really dumb if you ask me. :p

   Now if I only have some splurge money to get me a Mac. Hah.

4.   Download: TweakVista Public BETA

   June 23rd, 2007 at 5:13 pm

   4

   [...] I’m still fuming with Vista’s Defrag and my lost-and-found gigabyte of hard drive space and I’m stuck with it. I would’ve wanted to “upgrade” [...]

5. Brad Isaac

   June 23rd, 2007 at 6:55 pm

   5

   Although not the prettiest interface you might want to try JKDefrag
   Open source defragmenter

   http://www.kessels.com/JkDefrag/index.html

6. Alex

   June 23rd, 2007 at 9:24 pm

   6

   Hey thanks, Brad. I might try it out. Feature it here too if it works great.

   I’ve tried this out with XP and works okay. Not like commercial ones like O&O though. First time I’ll try it out with Vista though.

7. Arcestaff

   June 24th, 2007 at 11:34 am

   7

   Alex, I tried the big 3- O&O, PD and Diskeeper before I finally bought my DK Pro license. I asked around on some of the tech forums; the Vista defragger seems to be universally hated (Hello MSFT, are you listening?) and most of the members recommended Diskeeper. But I wanted to try out all three for myself before I blew $$$ on any of them.

   On my system, O&O used to defrag the slowest, Perfectdisk was faster and Diskeeper was the fastest. Ofcourse, the conditions under which I evaluated them were not 100% identical, but good enough for me to get a fairly accurate idea.

   All were MUCH faster than the vista defragger, all had progress charts, lots of options etc. I liked the UI and performance of Diskeeper the best, so I went with it. Also, Diskeeper seems like the standard recommendation when it comes to a defragger, so I figured I wouldn’t go wrong. So far, it seems to have been the right decision.

   Good luck with your selection.

   PS: I’ve heard of JKdefrag before, but after looking through their forums, it seems to have some bugs. I am not sure I want to trust my data to an unproven product. Unlike most freeware utilities, I have been a bit wary of some of these freeware defraggers- they usually promise more than they can deliver, and they play around directly with my data on the harddrive. This makes me a bit uncomfortable.

8. Alex

   June 24th, 2007 at 8:23 pm

   8

   Thanks for the heads up, Arcestaff. I might do some tests next time of my own (before I also spend my cold hard cash). I’ll keep your recommendation in mind.

9. whitefly

   August 2nd, 2007 at 4:21 pm

   9

   Know that you use Diskeeper. I bet you can’t use parential controls settings anymore?

10. Download: JkDefrag GUI

    August 7th, 2007 at 11:01 pm

    10

    [...] Here’s one more thing that can be added to the mix of candidates to replace Windows Vista’s really dumb Defragmenter. [...]

11. Chimp

    June 4th, 2008 at 12:42 pm

    11

    Hey guys. Great comments here. I read all 10 and decided to download JkDefrag from Brad Isaac (Cheers for the link mate!) I have only just got my new laptop with Vista on it, and whilst defragging I lost nearly 2 gig. Thanks to JkDefrag, I managed to recover an amazing 7 gig!! Happy? I’m over the moon. Cheers again Brad. Hope it works for you!!

12. Shawn

    July 10th, 2008 at 10:13 pm

    12

    ya but you shouldnt lose space when you trying to gain it lol