Vista’s Defrag is SLOW… Let’s speed it up a little

It’s no secret among those who have upgraded from Windows XP to Vista that Defrag (the process of reorganising the file structure on a hard disk drive) has slowed down somewhat with Microsoft’s latest OS release (discounting Windows 7 – which has not yet officially launched at this time).

It operates on an almost continual basis, defragmenting the hard drive on a regular schedule, which can mean that at times your PC will run like an old, three-legged dog with broken ankles, in other words… very SLOWLY.

So how can you speed things up?  Easy, and all it requires is two little downloads, an installation and a file copy…

• Download Microsoft’s Contig.exe (this allows any NT4-based OS to defrag a drive via the command line)
• Download PowerDefragmenter 3.0 which provides a user-friendly frontend for Contig.exe
• Install PowerDefragmenter
• Copy Contig.exe to the install folder of PowerDefragmenter (i.e. C:\Program Files\PowerDefragmenter\)
• Run PowerDefragmenter
• You are given the option to run the defrag on a drive, folder or file – pick you option and click Next
• PowerDefragmenter will launch Contig.exe and run the option you chose.

Running PowerDefragmenter on an 80GB Vista boot drive completed in just 16 minutes and 23 seconds on a test machine, not bad eh?

This tip comes from CustomPC magazine, issue 63 – December 2008