Windows Vista Feature Focus: Automatic Disk Defragmenter

Years ago, I wrote a review comparing various disk defragmenters. To my surprise, the Disk Defragmenter in Windows performed as well, or even a bit better than, the retail defragmenters that were available at the time. (Further complicating matters, Disk Defragmenter was made by Executive Software, now called Diskeeper, which of course sells its own commercial disk defragmenter product.)

Effectiveness aside, there has always been one crucial feature missing from the Windows Disk Defragmenter: It could never be configured to automatically defragment your system's hard drives. Instead, you would have to run the application or manually or learn how to use the Task Scheduler. In Windows Vista, that's all changed.

The Vista version of Disk Defragmenter includes two huge improvements over its predecessors. First, the application sports a vastly simplified user interface that does away with the colorful but pointless disk layout view, which you could literally watch as your hard disk was graphically defragged.

Second, Disk Defragmenter can be automatically scheduled to run. Indeed, it runs automatically, by default, at 4:00 am every Sunday morning. This is huge, because disk defragging is one of those mundane chores that most users really don't have time to perform. But it's something that should happen regularly in order to keep your system performing optimally.

The new Disk Defragmenter can be found at various points in the Windows Vista UI, but the most obvious is probably in the Start Menu: It can be found in All Programs, Accessories, System Tools.

Fun fact: Disk Defragmenter rearranges fragmented files on your hard disk so that the PC performs better. Because disk fragmentation occurs over time, it worsens with the passage of time. Automatic disk defrag is an absolutely essential feature in a modern operating system.

--Paul Thurrott
July 18, 2006
Updated February 22, 2007