Issues with 1.03

[Dch48]

Here are the issues I have, not necessarily in order of importance:

 

The colors are hideously ugly now.

It still leaves huge gaps in my drive after supposedly optimizing it.

It shows random blocks of "immovable files", that get overwritten with no problem but still does not show the page file as immovable.

 

This is what it looks like after a D&O and then a regular defrag afterwards to clean up what got left behind.

 

http://i325.photobucket.com/albums/k370/Dch48/defrag.jpg

[detailer]

target practice

 

Hi dch48-how you been?-Man, that is ugly! Did you ever try the 30 day trial of Perfect Disk? I really think you need something like that to whip that drive into shape, and then SD should be able to maintain it for you.Do you perform a lot of install/uninstall? Your stuff is all over the place.And agreed, the colors are horrible-not since Beta 6.10 has the GUI looked appealing -and on a personal note,my directory is shown as only one block-that's right one little green square,just like yours-used to be a line of @12-14 back two versions ago-but no performance problems to report

[Dch48]

I'm going to try Perfect Disk I guess. The thing I don't understand is that when I run the standard XP defragger, it consolidates the files much better. Then, when I run SD, it spreads them all over the place again.

[detailer]

It's About Time

 

Same here-I no longer use Win defrag-after PD, no problem keeping it together-I think you'll like the way PD works-some nice little extras,including boot-time,reg hives,etc-But, if you don't like it, don't complain-just reinstall your OS and start again :razz:

[Dch48]

Perfect Disk did consolidate the files much better, but, it actually fragmented my large game files that were not fragmented before and it will not defragment the metadata at boot. If I tell it to run at boot, I wind up with the screen that says Windows did not start normally and have to choose to start it again.

 

Trying to defrag just the files that didn't get defragged by PD when running Smart placement resulted in the worst mess yet with the selected files winding up with twice as many fragments as they had before it started and the worst spread out distibution I have ever seen. I'm now of the mind that both SD and PD fail miserably at doing a better job than the Defrag tool bundled in XP and I think I'll just go back to using that.

[IcyFrostPyro]

you might have a lotta system restores cramming your system. go start>All Programs>Accessories>system tools> disk cleanup. after its finished scanning, click the More Options tab and delete the system restores and shadow copies. you keep your last system restore you made and deletes the rest. great space maker :) then clean it out with ccleaner or asc3 or something and then like yeah you might have a better defragging problem

[enoskype]

IFP,

As far as I know, dch48 is using XP Media Center, and what you advice is for Vista.

 

For his OS, to get rid of the Restore Points, you have to go to:

System Properties=>System Restore=>check "Turn off System Restore" checkbox=>Apply=>uncheck "Turn off System Restore" checkbox=>Apply

That's it, all the old System Restore Points are gone and a new one created!!

 

Cheers.

[Dch48]

No--I reduced the space that system restore can use so I never have more than 5 or 6 restore points saved. I know how to delete them and have done it before. I don't think that's the problem at all. How can that affect defragmenting anyway? I have been reading more and more lately that the need to defragment is a thing of the past anyway and that it no longer results in any measurable gains in performance.

 

Perfect Disk, or should I say Imperfect Disk is simply the worst tool I have ever tried. It did consolidate the files but in the process massively fragmented any file larger than about 512mb that was not fragmented before it started. I have game files that are over 2 gigs in size. When I tried to defragment just those few files, it ran for about an hour and the files wound up with 2-3 times more fragments than they had before it started and the rest of my files wound up scattered all across the disk. It also was painfully slow. Slower than the windows defrag tool.

 

SD does a very good and fast job of defragmenting, but, the optimization routines simply do not work. When I watch it running, it takes a file to defrag and rewrites it in the first available space large enough to hold it. It doesn't matter at all where that space is located either. It never moves any files that are not fragmented to make space to hold files that should be moved to increase optimization. It only touches fragmented files. Therefore, it does not optimize anything.

 

The Windows defrag tool seems to be the only one that does an acceptable job on this laptop. I will use that as my primary one and just keep SD to do quick defrag only tuneups. Imperfect disk is history.

[detailer]

sorry to hear.......

 

Hi Dch48-I really thought PD would be your salvation.As for defrag vs. performance,I can attest to times from log on to desk top going from five seconds down to less than one second by defragging the boot files.As far as PD goes,it's done an excellent job with both of my pc's,as well as friends and family that use it.It's considered by the vast majority of users, researchers, and reviewers(independent or otherwise) to be among the very best utilities available for personal or commercial use.In respect to your situation,I fear your hard drive is beyond redemption(save some alien technology)I saw the screenshot,and it's ugly indeed.How on earth was it that your hard drive succumbed to such a state of disrepair?Was it a total lack of maintenance from day one? I gotta tell you,nothing short of a complete OS reinstall is going to solve your problems.Not to be rude,but for all of your complaining you sound like the guy that puts some air in his tires,changes the oil,and expects his car to be brand new again.Your situation is what it is.You've done the best you could with all the resources at your disposal,and fallen short of your expectations.So,maybe it's time to consider an OS reinstall,or some new hardware,but either way,it's definitely time to stop the whining and complaining about your dissatisfaction with the Iobit utility.You've made your point,loud and clear,and no amount of advice that's been dispensed on this forum has met with your satisfaction.We get it,you're not happy,and regretfully,I don't see what more can be accomplished here.Certainly you would agree that we have all tried to help you,and I'm sorry if you feel that the product and the forum have failed you.Perhaps it's time for you to seek out some other alternatives to address your issues. Respectfully,Detailer

[Dch48]

You could not be more wrong about me. I constantly keep up with the state of my system and I always keep it clean and operating the best I can. I do frequent defrags, registry cleanups and always clean out histories and temp files after EVERY browsing session. The same goes for my car. I do most of my own work. So--your comments are way off base. The mess depicted in my screenshot was CAUSED by SD. It has never looked that bad before. If I run the XP tool, it looks 300% better.

 

As far as PD goes, I did some research and found some very negative reviews of it. People have had files go missing and some have had to do a complete recovery from scratch after using it. Many also say that like I found, it does not do a complete job. Most reviews I read say that the free one from Auslogics is as good or better. I might try that one.

 

As I said, the defraggers work better on my g/f's desktop than they do on this laptop. Why, I have no idea. It may have something to do with the way HP set it up and the way they have it partitioned. No programs other than Microsoft and Norton seem to work well on this system either. Firefox is no faster than IE7, in fact, slower. I have to use the 3 year old video drivers that HP put on it because any newer ones not specifically made for it cause overheating and a black screen. Why the defrag programs don't work right is a mystery but it's not the fault of the HD or my OS. That much I know. No defrag program I have tried on this thing works better than the standard XP one and most are worse.

 

All my posts were meant to call attention to shortcomings I found in an attempt to provide input that would improve the utility. If that's not appreciated, so be it.

[solbjerg]

Hi Dch

How do you evaluate how good a job the different defragmenters do?

They are all using different algorithms and their parameters for most often used files, - and even for fragments can often vary wildly too, so to evaluate it on the basis of how it looks when another defragmenter is used, does not really tell you anything other than that their parameters are different.

If one is very lucky then perhaps one can notice an increased speed in the execution of the programs and that will give at least one way to measure it.

Cheers

solbjerg

 

 

You could not be more wrong about me. I constantly keep up with the state of my system and I always keep it clean and operating the best I can. I do frequent defrags, registry cleanups and always clean out histories and temp files after EVERY browsing session. The same goes for my car. I do most of my own work. So--your comments are way off base. The mess depicted in my screenshot was CAUSED by SD. It has never looked that bad before. If I run the XP tool, it looks 300% better.

 

As far as PD goes, I did some research and found some very negative reviews of it. People have had files go missing and some have had to do a complete recovery from scratch after using it. Many also say that like I found, it does not do a complete job. Most reviews I read say that the free one from Auslogics is as good or better. I might try that one.

 

As I said, the defraggers work better on my g/f's desktop than they do on this laptop. Why, I have no idea. It may have something to do with the way HP set it up and the way they have it partitioned. No programs other than Microsoft and Norton seem to work well on this system either. Firefox is no faster than IE7, in fact, slower. I have to use the 3 year old video drivers that HP put on it because any newer ones not specifically made for it cause overheating and a black screen. Why the defrag programs don't work right is a mystery but it's not the fault of the HD or my OS. That much I know. No defrag program I have tried on this thing works better than the standard XP one and most are worse.

 

All my posts were meant to call attention to shortcomings I found in an attempt to provide input that would improve the utility. If that's not appreciated, so be it.

[Dch48]

Yes, I will say that things did seem to be faster after using SD. I was just expressing surprise at the way it organized my files since it does not do that on the other machine we have here. On that one, which is a desktop emachine, SD works very well and puts all files at the front of the drive. On my laptop, it does not, it takes a fairly well organized disk done by the XP tool and scatters stuff around. Why that happens is a mystery.

[solbjerg]

Hi Dch

I have a Toshiba laptop with Windows XP media, for travelling, and the smartdefrag work fine on that too. So I do not understand why yours behave as it does.

Cheers

solbjerg

 

Yes, I will say that things did seem to be faster after using SD. I was just expressing surprise at the way it organized my files since it does not do that on the other machine we have here. On that one, which is a desktop emachine, SD works very well and puts all files at the front of the drive. On my laptop, it does not, it takes a fairly well organized disk done by the XP tool and scatters stuff around. Why that happens is a mystery.

[IcyFrostPyro]

auslogics doesnt fix things up as well. try jk defrag. auslogics just defrags but doesnt optimize so it defrags fast

[enoskype]

Hi Dch48,

 

Did you ever used Boot management software or antispyware/antivirus for Boot?

 

Your laptop's not letting the offline defrag reminds me that there may be a change in your MBR (Master Boot Record). I have experienced that once on my own laptop, and not to mention that it is noting to do with MFT.

All that mess of fragmentation in your system, perhaps, is coming from scattered system files on your disk, and defraggers not working as expected may be a result of changed MBR.

 

If that is the case, you can fix MBR with "Recovery Console" from your installation disk using "fixmbr" command.

You may get advice from an expert if you are not familiar with MBR, as this part of a PC should be dealed with extreme care.

 

Cheers.

[Dch48]

Hi Dch48,

 

Did you ever used Boot management software or antispyware/antivirus for Boot?

 

Your laptop's not letting the offline defrag reminds me that there may be a change in your MBR (Master Boot Record). I have experienced that once on my own laptop, and not to mention that it is noting to do with MFT.

All that mess of fragmentation in your system, perhaps, is coming from scattered system files on your disk, and defraggers not working as expected may be a result of changed MBR.

 

If that is the case, you can fix MBR with "Recovery Console" from your installation disk using "fxmbr" command.

You may get advice from an expert if you are not familiar with MBR, as this part of a PC should be dealed with extreme care.

 

Cheers.

 

There is no mess of fragmentation. SD defragments everything perfectly, it just does not place the files in optimal locations. when I run the XP tool it results in a fairly good placement of my files with only a few small gaps of empty space. If I run SD in D&O, it moves the files around and results in the kind of thing shown in my screenshot. Files get scattered and huge gaps of empty space result. I run the XP tool again and it consolidates much better. This does not happen on the desktop machine we have here and that is what puzzles me. I suspect it may have something to do with modifications done by HP. The BIOS is locked down with only a few basic options. It doesn't even show what drives are present or allow editing of their settings. There is a recovery partition of 13 GB and there also is a hidden partition of 1 gig that is required to let Quick Play work without booting fully into Windows. This partition does not show in any utilities as even being present, but it is there.

 

I also do not have a Windows installation disk. HP does not give you one and they do not provide them to you. All they have is a recovery system that sets the machine back to the state it was when it left the factory. It wipes the drive clean and reinstalls all the trial software and that junk. The recovery disks I made from the included software fill a full 4 DVD's. That's right, DVD's, not CD's

 

I did manage to make a bootable Windows CD from the i386 folder on my hard drive using software and instructions I found through google. I even managed to slipstream SP3 into it. The only thing is, I am not sure if it includes Media Center or if it is only XP Pro. I strongly suspect that it is only Pro because from my research it seems that Media Center is a completely seperate installation on top of Pro. I have not tried to access the recovery console from that disk yet but I'm sure I could. I'm just not completely sure it would work correctly. Link to how I made the disk---http://www.howtohaven.com/system/createwindowssetupdisk.shtml

 

The one thing Perfect Disk did do was tell me the status of my system files. It said that my boot and system files were in perfect condition but it also said that metadata was in poor condition with 30% fragmentation. Since the boot time defrag didn't seem to work, that was not fixed. I'm not sure exactly what it meant by metadata but I did see that the fragmented file was something starting with a $ and was something about a journal.

[enoskype]

Hi Dch48,

I may have misused the phrase "mess of fragmentation", although I didn't say fragmented files, It could have been understood as fragmented files.

 

Anyway, I wanted to mean scattered files, and also wanted to mean fragmented system files causing scattering of defragmented files.

The rest of the post is still valid and Metadata is considered to be a system file, as, Usn journal ($UsnJrnl:$J:$DATA) is metadata file and it is the data about the data.

In Vista, when it is fragmented upto around 60-70 fragments, it is not considered as a fragmented file to be defragmented, but, in XP, when it has more than about 40 fragments, than it is considered as a fragmented file to be defragged.

Since the most of the third party defraggers trying to have no fragmented files, specially with larger sized media files, they scatter them around the fragmented system(Metadata) files allover the disk (That is the reason to have an option of skipping defragmentation of defined large sized files). The result is you can not have large sized contiguous free clusters (contiguous free space).

 

I wonder, how many fragmented files you have just after XP's own defrag.

It may be compromising the fragmented files to free space consolidation.

 

All that said, I can not insist that not to be able to offline defrag is because of changed MBR, but it is a possibility.

 

I hope I made myself clear.

 

BTW, integration/merger (slipstreaming) of SPs is a tedious job, and easily mistakes can be made by unexpeienced users, I believe you are well expeienced PC user and not everybody dares to do what you have done.

Unfortunately I am not familiar with the Media Center edition of XP and you may well be right that the installation of XP MC is different than XP Pro.

My choice is, after slipstreaming, to integrate the Recovery Console to the Windows disk (C:), so you can directly boot to RC, if you permit 4-5 secs delay before booting to Windows without in need of an install/recovery CD.

 

Cheers

[Dch48]

I downloaded the free trial of Diskeeper to see how that worked and it seemed very good until I tried to do the boot time defrag and once again it did not work. It said that the volume could not be accessed because it might be in use by something else. I tried every workaround and fix for that that I could find but nothing worked. I even totally turned off my Norton Internet security but that didn't change anything either. Then I discovered that Diskeeper replaces the Windows defrag tool in all the shortcuts and you can't even get to the XP tool any more. I found that too intrusive so I have also decided against using Diskeeper.

 

After I run the XP tool, there are no fragmented files. Every tool I have tried says that when it analyzes the disk including SD. So, do you think I should still try that fixmbr or not?

[enoskype]

I did it for my HP nx 7010 laptop with XP Pro without any problems and corrected the MBR when it was SP2,

BUT,

Since you have the Media Center edition, and you created the originally non existent RC, I would still say that you should consult to a Media Center user expert.

 

Sorry, not being definitive, but I don't want to be blamed for a corrupted MBR, as I don't know what can be done later, if everything goes south!!!

 

Cheers.

[megaman]

Try Ultimate Defragmenter

 

When I used 1.02 and 1.03 of SD, I usually get "Not enough free disk space" for some files. This pretty much leaves my fragmentation at 9.XX%. Which it's pretty annoying trying to free up disk space to make the defrag work (noting that I don't want to delete any of my files). So I tried Disktrix Ultimate Defragmenter, which did it's job. After doing an analyze on SD (being after defragmenting with UD), I got .18% of fragments on SD. I don't know if you have to pay for the Perfect Disk (noting that it's a limited Evaluation Period), but I used the free version of Ultimate Defragmenter. Just wondering if you guys can take a look at that program and work some ideas after seeing how it works. Can't wait for the 1.04 version. Also, I would like to add that the really old versions of Iobit Smart Defrag could read my MP3 player in USB Flash form, but now it can't. Maybe it couldn't, heck to remember. XDXD

[solbjerg]

Hi megaman

How much free space do you have??

Cheers

solbjerg

 

 

When I used 1.02 and 1.03 of SD, I usually get "Not enough free disk space" for some files. This pretty much leaves my fragmentation at 9.XX%. Which it's pretty annoying trying to free up disk space to make the defrag work (noting that I don't want to delete any of my files). So I tried Disktrix Ultimate Defragmenter, which did it's job. After doing an analyze on SD (being after defragmenting with UD), I got .18% of fragments on SD. I don't know if you have to pay for the Perfect Disk (noting that it's a limited Evaluation Period), but I used the free version of Ultimate Defragmenter. Just wondering if you guys can take a look at that program and work some ideas after seeing how it works. Can't wait for the 1.04 version. Also, I would like to add that the really old versions of Iobit Smart Defrag could read my MP3 player in USB Flash form, but now it can't. Maybe it couldn't, heck to remember. XDXD

[megaman]

memory space

 

I had 22 gigs, but when I was done with UD, it showed my space as 28 gigs. It wouldn't defrag 2 files that were 4 gigs each (Iobit Smart Defrag that is). Seriously, can you guys put the ability to defrag my mp3 player in "USB Flash" mode? O&O could read it along with the XP defragmenter, but the Vista defragger and Ultimate Defragmenter, not so much. Would really appreciate it.