A couple of Defraggler Questions...

I just started using Defraggler, and was wondering if someone could answer a couple of questions for me. I haven't been able to figure this out.

I am running Windows Vista Ultimate in case it matters.

1) When I started defragging with Defraggler I had 62% free space. After I had 51% free space... Um... Why would this be? It doesn't make sense to me.

2) I have 6 or 7 very large files with a path of "C:/System Volume Information/" that need to be defragged, but Defraggler isn't able to defrag these for some reason. Why is this?

3) I have a pagefile.sys and a hiberfil.sys that it doesn't tell me it cannot defrag, but it also doesn't appear to do anything. Are these two files not supported?

4) After defragging, does Defraggler compact like Windows Defragger does, or do I need to run that as well? Is there any potential problems to running both?

Thanks Again. This seems like a really cool program. I love CCleaner and Recuva, so I'm sure I'll love Defraggler as well. :)

first time ive used this program too, had a few questions but no one in here seems to have any idea. I would have thought system volume files may have included boot or windows files that could not be altered- although i could be wrong. the loss of space you mention does seem odd, along with the fact that on my pc even after no use whatsoever after a defrag, the same files keep showing up as needing a defrag on the windows drive.. even after being supposedly defragged. could be a bug, although cant be 100% on that. I havent noticed the loss of space so i will take more notice on how much i have before and after i use it. Some people have mentioned that certain versions of vista however will create automatic restore points when running third party programs that have the potential to greatly modify your system, so the space after a restart should return to normal either after a certain time period, or after deleting these new restore points. thanks

1) When I started defragging with Defraggler I had 62% free space. After I had 51% free space... Um... Why would this be? It doesn't make sense to me.

This is a very common problem lately. I realized this, and had to make a new system restore point, and delete all the others before it. It's a restore point, though, as has been said before, but I'm far too lazy to link up.

2) I have 6 or 7 very large files with a path of "C:/System Volume Information/" that need to be defragged, but Defraggler isn't able to defrag these for some reason. Why is this?

I think, heh, that those are system restore points. It's been suggested that one shouldn't defrag those anyways.

I just started using Defraggler, and was wondering if someone could answer a couple of questions for me. I haven't been able to figure this out.

I am running Windows Vista Ultimate in case it matters.

Thanks Again. This seems like a really cool program. I love CCleaner and Recuva, so I'm sure I'll love Defraggler as well. :)

Hi mlyons,

Welcomer to the forums. :D

Good questions that you have.

I wish I had Vista to do some testing with myself but not yet.

I have done research into what is going on and as more information becomes available I will do more.

Some editions of Vista do some things different than others and all that data takes more time to sink in without being able to use Vista myself.

Basically it comes down to Vista being more alert to changes occurring and either creating more Restore Points or creating more copies of things that are being changed.

It may just be a Vista thing that the Defraggler dev. team need to make some changes or additions to Defraggler to compensate. Vista Defragmenter has special things that it performs to cut down on this usage.

A simple run of the Vista Defragmeter seems to clear things up. It is just different than most people understand. Some defrag products will show that Vista Defragmenter must be leaving things fragmented.

It is true that it does. It is of no benefit to defragment certain size files any further. Lets face it having a 2 GB file in 3 segments or 30 segments is not going to benefit from further defragmenting. The magic number seems to be around 64 MB segments.

See these articles for more in depth information related to what I have tried to explain.

Vista Disk Defragmenter FAQ

http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/articles/440717.aspx

Don?t judge a book by its cover ? why Windows Vista Defrag is cool

http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/archive/2...ag-is-cool.aspx

Features of the Windows Vista hard disk defragmentation utility

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942092

Good luck,

:) davey

P.S. My advice to anyone would not include deleting any System Restore Points. This data is too important to the user. Vista will return this "Lost" space to you in its time or just run the Vista Defragmenter if you can't wait to see your "Lost" space for whatever comfort that brings to your heart. In other words, the space is not "lost". It is being temporarily used by Vista and will be available if it is needed.

P.S. Another little note to point out to many users is that defragmenting returns very little space to the user.

The Defragmenter program in its processes results in other programs freeing up space .

I try to keep restore points to a minimum1, clearing them out once a week. But perhaps my suggestion was a little touchy on the topic that some people might actually need them. I've only ever had to use a restore point once, and that was a year or so ago, and it was because of a faulty partitioning.

Anyways, thanks, Davey, you pointed out some things I didn't know, and, as always, I am grateful for the knowledge.

1 - Reason being that within a week, the restore point storage hits around 50-60 GB, and they rarely get used. I hate wasted space.

Thanks everyone for the friendly welcome and the answers to my questions.

I hadn't even thought about restore points. It seems odd that Vista creates restore points when defragmenting a file, but it takes up a lot of space quick. I can lose 10% or more during a defrag, and my hard drive is 320 GB's... That's a lot of space. Also, certain versions of Vista also backup individual copies of files, so you can have almost like a versioning of a particular file. I have absolutely no idea what spurs this, or when this happens, but I have noticed this is happening. With large files, this can take up a great deal of space quickly as well. I have found that when I restart my computer and run Defraggler to analyze or whatever, I never do know what it's going to show. It's really a surprise every time how much free space I'll have...

I just ran the Vista Defragmenter and was really shocked to see that it no longer notifies you of progress (As XP's did)? Dear god who thought that was a good idea? I quit the defrag. I like Defraggler a lot, and don't see how a defragmentation tool could not have some sort of progress indication. I guess just another quirk in Vista...

Ultimately, the various versions of Vista all do things differently, so I don't know how that'll impact Defraggler development. I have Vista Ultimate here...

I do agree on restore points. They are important. I kind of just let Windows handle removing those. There is a built in cap as to how much space restore points can take too. It's normally set at 10% of the hard drive space. I don't know if this can be changed. It does change as free space changes, allowing more room for the user's use.

Thanks Again,

Linked from the FAQ Davey linked to.

Why was the defrag progress indicator removed?

Part of the problem with the Windows XP defrag tool was that percent complete was not accurate or meaningful. Depending on the phase of defrag, 1% of progress could take from several seconds to minutes, which made the progress indicator highly unreliable. The difficulty here is that since defrag is a multi-pass process (multiple iterations of file defragmentation and free space consolidation) there is no way to accurately predict when defrag will complete since the number of loop iterations and how long each takes are highly dependent on the layout of the files on the volume, the level of file and free space fragmentation, and the other system activity. While I agree that having no progress is bad, misleading progress I believe is worse. Also, the idea behind the new automated defrag is that users will not have to think about it not worry about the progress it is making. With defrag running regularly, the system will be close to optimal levels of fragmentation, and subsequent defrag runs should not take long.

Yeah, I saw that, but it doesn't mean I have to like it... LOL A slightly inaccurate progress notification is still worlds better than NONE... LOL I am soooooooooooooooooooo glad that Defraggler has something.

Actually, I prefer the Vista defrag compared to the XP one.

Why's that if you don't mind my asking? I don't like things that don't show progress... I mean, how am I supposed to know how long it's going to defrag for? It just seems odd to me. It sounds like the Vista one is supposed to work much better than the XP one, and that's great, but progress notification is important to me...

Why's that if you don't mind my asking? I don't like things that don't show progress... I mean, how am I supposed to know how long it's going to defrag for? It just seems odd to me. It sounds like the Vista one is supposed to work much better than the XP one, and that's great, but progress notification is important to me...

I was able to run it earlier today, and still do my day-to-day things. It wasn't system-intensive, and it didn't lag out my system. It was barely noticeable! I wasn't able to do some of the things I do while the XP defragger was running. Progress notification is a relatively small thing compared to functionality. Both work, but the Vista defragger, so far, works better, methinks.