defrag interface: one year later

In my first post to this blog last year, I showed the difference between the Windows Disk Defragmenter on Windows XP and that on Windows Vista. The bottom line was that the Vista version lost the graphical interface and the user has no idea what is going on in the background.

With the release of Windows 7, one would hope that this annoyance has been taken care of. Sadly, this is not the case. The interface does give some information on what it is doing, but the user gets no idea of how much progress has been made, and the graphical display we have come to love in XP is long gone.


Fortunately, the good folks at Piriform have created a defragmentation utility called Defraggler that shows the defragmentation operations on the hard disk in real-time. This is even better than XP's defrag utility. The visual display is, of course, only one of the great features of this utility. I only gave it a quick try (and loved the Quick Defrag option), but the interface was enough to amend the sorrows caused by Vista and Windows 7.

Vista kills Disk Defragmenter

This is what the Disk Defragmenter looked like in XP.



This is what it looks like in Vista.



I do not even need to explain why the Vista version totally sucks. You have no idea what's going on behind the scene, nor do you have any hint as to how far the defragmentation has progressed and how much longer it will take.

As one of my best lecturers once said, a good program needs to be verbose, and that means that it keeps the user informed of what it's doing.