Well before Vista was even real, I wrote about the problematic issues, bad practices for customers, and locked in formats that would make Apple Mac a highly attractive option. Pretty much most of the things people said couldn’t or wouldn’t happen have. It’s no wonder that the US Government would rather keep XP than move to Vista, that students on college campuses are reporting terrible problems interfacing with the IT departments and campus infrastructure, and that even Office formats are in dispute.
Even in our own offices, Vista has been one disaster after another, causing us all kinds of heart ache and productivity loss.
We thought the nightmare was over when we found a clever hack to make Vista think our networked HP LaserJet was a local printer (and we’d given up on being able to even use sound). However, we’ve been getting terrible disk performance on a laptop with Vista installed. Turns out the drive is badly fragmented.
Obviously, an XP user would simply run Disk Defrag and let that be that.
Not so with Vista. Sure, it has the program, but it provides no indicator of how much work needs to be done, and no visual interface at all about what’s being done. All you get is a stupid message that says the operation could take minutes to hours to complete.
So, we let Vista run overnight. And performance didn’t improve. At all.
You’ve got to see the conversation over on the Microsoft Developer Network about Vista’s defrager.
It seems that Microsoft expects you to leave your machine running all the time, and at some time like 2am on Wednesday, it will run the defrag automatically for you. Whether you want it to or not. And it will do the same crappy job.
If you’re running an enterprise service, you do not want to take an I/O channel hit “just because.” If you’re an IT administrator, you don’t want to screw with scheduling. If you’re a laptop user, you don’t want to leave your machine running.
Now I know I said I wasn’t going to give Microsoft support anymore. But I occasionally will share tips.
Grab the free version of Auslogic’s Disk Defrag. It will impress you. It’s clean, crisp, visual, astoundingly fast, and most importantly: it solved our fragmentation problems.
I just ran into an interesting dilemma.
This blog gets a lot of comments, a number of them spam and a number of them fluff. I occasionally invoke editorial privileges, sparing the reader from such things as to provide a high quality content without the noise. I don’t actively try to filter everything, I may even miss stuff, but if I feel the value of the page goes up by directly omitting content, I might act.
Additionally, to provide higher quality, I tend to make sure that you get the whole picture, so that if a reader comments, you get the full context and disclosure when it’s appropriate.
Today a reader left a comment recommending PerfectDisk, an alternative solution. However, two things tripped me up. One, the comment felt like it was more marketing in nature. Two, while it came from a personal account, the IP address showed it came from an employee. No links were provided, so I pondered was this an employee who really believed in the product their company sold, or was it a clever way of getting their product name out there, or was it merely an attempt to get white listed? I had no way to be sure from looking at the message. Oddly enough, I found a few instances of similarly human-constructed messages on other blogs of similar nature about the product. Either someone’s being very helpful or someone knows how to game the system. I would have felt much more comfortable had the poster announced they worked for the company.
See, I get a lot of companies searching for competitor products and asking for their product to be listed as well. I don’t do that. If I recommend it, it means I’ve used it or seen it in operation. You know it works.
But, at the same time, I don’t want to hold back alternate solutions from readers such as yourself.
So, Erin, this is the compromise I came up with on short notice. You wanted to let the world know about the product; there it is in bold print.
Readers will have to make a choice. At the moment, this product has not been tried, tested, or approved at the Walt-O-Matic; it may be good, it may be bad. General Google reviews do seem positive, though.
I realize this is an old blog but here is a link that works for that Auslogic Disk Defrag you suggested. It’s for the download. The link you’ve up there, ended up hitting their 404 page.
http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/download