How to Get a Detailed File Fragmentation Report in Vista

The first time you thought about your Vista PC’s hard drive possibly being fragmented, you probably went clicking around in the Start menu and Accessories looking for the defrag utility that you thought should be there. When you found it, were you a little nonplussed when you found this uninspiring application window?

The visual graph of defrag in Windows XP is not included in Vista.

This seems to be part of Vista’s bipolar nature. When you expect something impressive, like a full screen defragmentation utility that shows glowing and cleared blocks of data animated to show progress, you get a small dialog. When you expect nothing at all, Vista pops up a window in the system tray bragging that it’s retrieving the Program Guide. Gee. Do we really need to know that?

And hey, at least they could have changed the icon.

Fortunately, the command-line abilities of the defrag utility can show more information. Here’s the result of a simple run.

We’ll return to this to get a more detailed report, but for the sake of caution, let’s…

In Vista, it’s a good idea to set a restore point, or go-back-to point, before installing new software or doing maintenance such as editing the registry, which may affect the stability of your PC.

Here’s the absolute fastest way to create a restore point in Vista that I've found:

1. Click start and type in “systempropertiesprotection”

2. If User Access Control is active, click Continue

3. Click Create

4. Enter a meaningful name for your restore point

5. Click Create and watch as it makes the restore point

6. Click OK to close the System Properties dialog.

Now, in order to get a more detailed report, we need to start an elevated command prompt. Do this: press the Vista Start button on your keyboard and click on All Programs, then Accessories. Right-click “Command Prompt” and select “Run as administrator.”

While you’re at it, why not repeat the action and select Command Prompt, right-click, Pin to Program Menu. Many of the how-to articles and tips here on Bright Hub involved doing something at the command prompt.

In the command prompt (DOS box), drag the lower edge to go to the full depth of your screen.

Then type in this command:

defrag C: -A -V

This translates into “perform fragmentation analysis on the C: drive and report your findings verbosely.”

This also takes a while to run. In fact, defrag in Windows Vista is slow. Although we’re running it manually, remember that it was designed to be run as a background process. Feel free to do something else on your PC while it completes.

Fragmentation is a by-product of how the file system works. Ideally, all the data on a hard drive would be written sequentially, in a circular pattern on a platter on the drive, allowing for a direct, or bitwise, reading of the hard drive. When we delete a file, however, it may leave a gap in the smooth flow of data. Windows has no qualms about storing data in these gaps, even if it involves only putting part of a large file in the first gap it finds, another part in the next gap, etc. It’s sort of like trying to fit square pegs into a round hole.

When defragmentation reaches the point where dealing with it is causing too much movement of the read heads in the hard drive and really slowing down drive access, the disk needs to be defragged.

To be fair, Microsoft has gotten better and better at avoiding significant fragmentation, so the need to run defragmentation is much decreased in Vista.

Next: The Detailed Report, Wrapping Up, and Further Reading