Vista Defrag is just STUPID

[Retired Bill]

I too think Vista Defrag sucks too, it's just stupid to have a process
without at least a status bar showing percent of process complete. Every
install package, tool, utility, etc. all show a status bar of process
complete.
You MVP's may be geeks but your own arrogance about what you think users
need is regrettable. Obviously the overwhelming opinion of knolwageable
users indicate they want a more descritive "defrag" process.
I managed system engineers most of my career at Boeing (BCS) and understood
the customers (users) requirements. You just ignor them. Wonder if Balmer
knows about this issue and your inability to satisfy your customers ?????

[Peter Flindt]

I am fully agree, and I still not know who test the vista beta version
(Or any other beta version, e.g. look at the IE) , where the result of
the beta phase influence the finished product, and/or if someone from
MS, not this MVP guys other MS experts, read ever any feature request
or comments from the USERS, specifically "normal" Users.

[Tiberius]

yes it is.. I have posted numerous times about this.. yet the vistaboys
don't seem to understand...

strange how people can have so diverse views about clearly logical and
undeniable facts!

[John Barnes]

There are numerous free and for sale defrags you can use that have all the
bells and whistles you want to pay for. Some will even delete your restore
points.

I guess Microsoft did not realize the number of people that like to stare at
the defrag screen.
They figured people would play solitaire or chess during that time.

[Andrew McLaren]

Boeing is a respected company with a proud tradition of engineering
excellence. Some years ago, I did some work with TOP networks ("Technichal
Office Protocol") a networking standard which was developed under Boeing's
guidance. It was a really solid product.

On a minor point of, um, blame and responsibility ... be aware that MVPs are
*not* Microsoft employees; and in fact, often MVPs only have a tenuous
formal association with Microsoft (often none, apart from an MVP
certificate). In my experience, MVPs have little influence on product
design - we occassionally get polled by product groups, but that would be a
extremely tiny component of the team's overall design input. Certainly,
no-one ever asked me about the design of the new defrag, before it appeared
in the beta!

MVPs may indeed be arrogant, but ... that's a separate proposition :-)

Your comments would probably be more appropriately directed at Microsoft
program managers, product managers and developers.

On the defrag thing ... well, I agree with your general propsition that
there needs to be better feedback between users and product design at
Microsoft. Too many features in Vista seem randomly changed, overly complex,
too much work for too little return, or just broken. However, I happen to
think the redesign of Defrag doesn't fall into this category, it was
actually a *good* thing.

Back during the Vista beta, many of us asked "what the hell happened to
Defrag? Where's the UI?" It turned out that the graphical display of the
disk in the "old" Defrag was very inaccurate, and only a very loose
impression of what was happening on the disk. Fixing that was non-trivial.
Many of your complaints are addressed in the Defragmenter FAQ, written by
the Storage team at Microsoft:
http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/articles/440717.aspx

But, keep voicing opinions about what you don't like in Vista ... if enough
of us scream loudly enough, we might have some influence on future trends.

[ray]

No offense, but it seems rather stupid to me that it's necessary to
defragment a drive in the 21st century. Properly designed file systems for
other operating systems seem to have dispensed with that quite a number of
years ago.

[Frank]

Vistaboys? Who the hell are they?
Vista defrags just fine in the background. That's what confuses new
users (you are now using Vista correct capin' crunch?) as they try and
compare Vista's defrag with XP's. Old habits are hard to break for some.
That's the problem with fools like you who can't accept change. Anyway,
please tells us all what background defragmenting has to do with the
efficacy of the app?

[Peter Flindt]

That's exactly is the point where I am not sure. How many MS
application I can find where a lot of "normal" users said "WTF? WHY?",
and nothing changes in the next or next but one version?

On the other side the normal IE, Messenger, OS, ... are designed for
the mass market, not for experts, therfore some comments from experts
make not really sense when they said "No need for this".

Obviously Microsoft went this route to try and hide the fact that their
pathetic filesystems requires defragging in the first place. Must be the
result of Linux-envy, because Linux's advanced fileysystems don't require
defragging.

[Adam Albright]

Find any mirror, state into it. The idiot you see staring back is a
Vistaboy, fanboy, moron, chump, chimp, kiss-up, boot licker, Microsoft
apologist, etc.. Doesn't really matter what you or other idiots like
you are called, all terms interchangeable as you've demonstrated
countless times already.

You see it really boils down to dopes like you being so damn stupid
that you are blind to reality and when not acting like a mob of rabid
monkeys throwing their own feces around will blindly defend Microsoft
no matter what. Logic and reason are totally foreign to you. Your
problem is you're totally ignorant to how many users truly suffer
daily due to major blunders, shortcomings, design flaws and flat out
sloppy programming and haphazard testing that is the hallmark of each
new version of Windows ever since it's inception.

Because Microsoft depends on an army of dimwitted minions like you to
jump up and down and scream how wonderful each new version of Windows
is while you squeeze your eyes tightly shut to reported problems and
pretend there are no problems unless you encounter them yourself you
validate Microsoft's legendary incompetence.

The result of dolts like you denying that Vista has serious problems,
your constant need to attempt to belittle and make fun of people
having real problems, your endless lying, squealing like a rabid
monkey and non stop desk pounding tells Microsoft that good enough is
good enough.

So instead of quality software Microsoft concludes idiots like you
must make up a sizeable portion of their customer base, they don't
know any better or care and accordingly are quite happy with mediocre
software infested with bugs, poor design, sluggish performance,
bloated code and all the rest and therefore make no effort to strive
to do any better. Hell, why should they if idiots like you are happy
with garbage?

So you see Frank it is really babbling fools like you that are in part
responsible for Windows being as bad as it is. You wallow in
mediocrity. You actually revel in it because the cold hard truth is
you're just a babbling fool that badly fakes trying to pass himself
off as expert on so many things. You're nothing of the sort. You are
in reality a reckless fool that just slips by and is perfectly content
with crap because in what passes for your mind you simply are
incapable of even dreaming of anything better.

Yes, as you said, old habits are hard to break. You've demonstrated
you are incapable of acting civil, totally uninterested in having a
normal discussion. You much prefer to insult, scream, yell and in
general refrain from acting like the feces covered rabid wild eyed
lying monkey we all have come to know you to be. I wish you would
change, but we both know you won't, because you can't. You are what
you are. A sad, sick, twisted mental case. You yourself have confirmed
that beyond all doubt.

[Communikator]

Sorry for interrupting the sometimes ugly banter that's pouring on this
thread, but I have a documented opinion, too.
I've installed Windows 2000 for using it as a fail-safe, and just wanted to
know how the Vista's system drive looks like after the scheduled
defragmentation (once a week), because I got no visual representation of the
defragmentation process - I simply wanted to check the background
defragmenter. What I've seen in the Windows 2000 Defragmenter made me sick,
and I haven't fully recovered yet, as it may show...
I've run the Win2000 defrag because I thought like a fool that same file
systems (aka NTFS) would behave the same (aside the improved security on
Vista) when managed by better-and-better management applications. Yeah,
right. The free space on the Vista's system disk is about 50% of the total.
The Win2000's defrag analysis showed up about 50% of the Vista drive files
in red lines, that is 25% of the occupied space was (still) utterly
fragmented. After 1 (one) hour of scheduled defragmentation... Hoping for
the best, I defragged the said drive with Win2000's Defragmenter and the
things got better. Visually, of course, because I have no way of telling if
that 50% of Vista system files have to be fragmented. There were, of course,
files that could not be defragmented, but 50% of NTFS space !...
I continue to work with Vista, though, as the problems are relatively minor
(the experience index app crashes when running the Direct3D ALU test, the
Classic Start menu behaves irresponsibly). For those that already hate this
OS, say only this: install it for testing and aquaintance under VMWare or
VirtualPC, and perform the production work or gaming under XP or 2000
(Win2000 _never_ crashed on 3 of my pc's and I see it as the most reliable
home-use OS). Cheers

[David]

Knowing and caring are two different animals. I'm confident he knows.
I'm also confident he doesn't give a flying you-know-what. :)

Agreed! I use Vopt. Old school and works fine in Vista.

I run the defrag from Command Prompt, this shows progress, CMD is still so
important in vista its not funny!

[Achilles]

Vista's defrag is a decent idea probably stolen by Microsoft from
elsewhere and completely butchered in implementation.

Why is it a good idea? Because it automates atleast one (reasonably
important) aspect of system maintenance and frees the user from worrying
about it. An intelligent automatic defragmenter is far more efficient
than wasting a few hours defragmenting the drives manually or scheduling
the defrag for a low traffic period based on guesswork. Why do the work
for the system when it ought to be working for you?

Why did MS botch it up? Well, (1) Vista's defrag doesnt seem to work
all that well, when fragmentation levels are analyzed with 3rd party
tools, and (2) it offers users no progress display to even check what's
going on, or any way of controlling the process, setting defrag
properties on individual drives etc.

So, the two faced nature of Vista's defragger is quite surprising
considering that third party desktop defrag utilities are already
available that utilize the server defragmentation approach (intelligent
and automatic) and do a fantastic job.

Er..carry on with the flamewars now...

[occam]

The title of this post is half right. Vista defrag is not only simple
minded - it treats its users as simple minded morons who do not need to
know details. Howz about a defrag report after analysis, MS? Rather than
the bland statement "your disc does not need to be defragged" [implying
.... no, I'm not going to tell you why, now piss of and don't bother me
until next time]

[Wish I was diving]

I am trying to solve a problem on a friend's laptop running Vista. I thought
the diskeeper isn't running at all but after reading this I have the
impression it might be running but there's no way for me to tell for sure. Is
that right?
Completely agree with your conclusions by the way, Retired Bill!

That's hefty language you're using, Frank. I think you're missing a point
though: many users - actually a vast majority - just wants to know what's
going on when a program is running. Not every change is by default a change
for the better and in this case it's definitely a step backward. I'd also say
that having a different opinion doesn't necessarily qualify as a 'fool'.

He also seems like a very strange man...

[Gordon]

You will get a far better experience if you use a newsreader and subscribe
to these groups directly, rather than through TechArena.
Setting up Outlook Express/Windows Mail to access Microsoft newsgroups
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/ou...snewreader.htm

Accessing the MS newsgroups in Outlook Express/Windows Mail Newsreader
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/e...roupsetup.mspx