Sunday, September 28, 2008

Veeesta tidbit

Just found a helpful hint for Vista users out there.  Unlike in previous versions of Windows, Vista has no GUI for Disk Defragmenter. You can't tell how fragmented your disk is, how long it will take to defrag and how far along the process is, while it's going.  You also get no results back when it's finished and often it tells you that the disk needs to be defragged as soon as it finishes!  This sucks from all angles.

Cruising the nerdy, tech sites I learned that you can still crank this puppy up from the command line, with options.  You can get summary reports for analysis, or both analysis and results.  You can also choose your disk, do a partial defrag, etc.  The command is simply defrag <drive you want to defrag>: followed by any flag you want/need.  The flags simply modify the command and are in the format -c, -v, -a,-w, -r, etc.  If you want to defrag your C drive and see a report for before and after defrag, you type this at the command prompt:   defrag C: -v

A complete and coherent explanation can be found at Ask the Performance Team.  These guys are great at breaking down complicated and unfamiliar topics, synthesizing them into something the lay person can easily understand and take home to use on their own boxes.  Hope this helps ya'll.

Vista has some real shitty quirks, but I'm liking it better every day as I learn more about it, or at least learn how to get around the shit I don't like about it, like that annoying User Account Control.

No comments: