defrag display

couldn't find a search option to see if this topic has been covered, so here I am again. You have been so helpful, hoping you will be so again...

I would like to have a visual defrag window as in XP, rather than just information of percentage. I realise that defragging can be scheduled as a background operation, but I prefer to do it manually and to SEE!. I am sure there are 3rd party utils I could use, but would most like the same appearance as XP. Can this be done please??

We had a discussion in a newsgroup thread a few years ago about disk defragmenters and the consensus view was that the graphical display of defragmentation progress was largely a facade: more to occupy the user than to show what was actually happening. Many thought that modern defragmenters that just operate in the background and skip the slide show were more "honest".

But we OCD types just love to see the little boxes being lined up in perfect order and we feel cheated when we can't see that going on. So if you must, then a 3rd party solution may work for you.

Just FYI, the Disk Defragmenter command-line interface, defrag.exe, includes several new switches which can be used when running the defrag.

Some interesting switches are:

/E – Perform the operation on all volumes except those specified.
/H – Run the operation at normal priority (default is low).
/M – Run the operation on each volume in parallel in the background.
/T – Track an operation already in progress on the specified volume.
/U – Print the progress of the operation on the screen.
/V – Print verbose output containing the fragmentation statistics.
/X – Perform free space consolidation on the specified volumes.

For example,

defrag /c /h /u /m

will defragment all volumes in parallel in the background at normal priority with progress status displayed on screen.

well thank you all for your input. OK no can do - I am not going to cry (sniff), I will leave it as it is and go do other things while it defrags. Not worth getting a 3rd party in just to keep me amused

that does sound interesting HMonk, I will tootle along and take a look - thank you :)

If you want to watch things being defraged Auslogics Disk Defrag will give it to you. It's free. If you want a paid for program Diskeeper Pro is great. At this time I use W7 defrager and it seems to work as well as any free program it just doesn't have little squares jumping around with different colors.