Disk maintenance tools for Vista?

[weemadando]

Seeing as defrag in Vista can apparently run forever and you never know exactly how far through it is, are there any recommendations people have for good maintenance tools for Vista that are preferably not several hundred dollars of made of malware?

[phongn]

Just let Vista do it's thing in the background and you'll be fine. Fragmentation is overrated, anyways.

[Stark]

This is one of those things that I laugh at - there's a whole industry of paid utilities that DO SOMETHING NIGH USELESS a bit FASTER than the automatic Vista process to make nerds who grew up on FAT16 but never bothered to stay current feel better. If you want to see coloured blocks move around, Auslogics have a defrag thing that works fine in Vista, but their claims of '6% performance increase' are laughably vague hogwash.

[Count Chocula]

Defrag's just another process...let 'er run. Let's see, I'll pull up my task manager...

....1 application running. 80 processes. CPU Usage: 7%.

Now defragmenting C: drive....83 processes. 34% CPU Usage. If you aren't playing an online game, you're all good. Wups, CPU load back down to 7%. Now 3%. 5%.

You get the drift. Oh yah, and I'm on batteries.

[Stark]

Chocky, the performance hit of a defrag may be measured in read and seek times, not CPU usage. My understanding is Vista automatically uses idle time to deal with this sort of thing which is far less of an issue anyway than it was in 1994. Nerds just want 'power user tools' to feel like they're 'streamlining' their 'performance'.

Like blue LEDs on ram sticks.

[Executor32]

If you think that's bad, Stark, my last PC had graphic equalizer-style LED memory usage meters on the tops of the sticks. I didn't buy them for that, at least, it was merely an 'added value' feature on some cheap RAM. What kind of value is added by such a thing is beyond me, though I'm sure the aforementioned performance nerds got a hard-on for it.

[Count Chocula]

Chocky, the performance hit of a defrag may be measured in read and seek times, not CPU usage.

Wait, what...you mean Vista's hiding useful information from me? Dammit, I never expected that! Now to find out if my old 16-bit Norton Dashboard works on 64-bit Vista...I totally forgot about disk access times. Oops.

Just kidding about the Norton thing, too. If my laptop won't run TIE Fighter, it probably won't run system tools for Win95 too well either.

[General Zod]

Chocky, the performance hit of a defrag may be measured in read and seek times, not CPU usage.

Wait, what...you mean Vista's hiding useful information from me? Dammit, I never expected that! Now to find out if my old 16-bit Norton Dashboard works on 64-bit Vista...I totally forgot about disk access times. Oops.

Just kidding about the Norton thing, too. If my laptop won't run TIE Fighter, it probably won't run system tools for Win95 too well either.

Don't be so sure. A lot of ancient x86 applications still work on Vista. It's just that Vista likes some apps better than others.

[Beowulf]

Chocky, the performance hit of a defrag may be measured in read and seek times, not CPU usage.

Wait, what...you mean Vista's hiding useful information from me? Dammit, I never expected that! Now to find out if my old 16-bit Norton Dashboard works on 64-bit Vista...I totally forgot about disk access times. Oops.

Just kidding about the Norton thing, too. If my laptop won't run TIE Fighter, it probably won't run system tools for Win95 too well either.

Don't be so sure. A lot of ancient x86 applications still work on Vista. It's just that Vista likes some apps better than others.

64-bit Vista will not run 16-bit apps.

[General Zod]

64-bit Vista will not run 16-bit apps.

Are you sure? I've been able to get some pretty old games running in 64-bit Vista (like Planescape Torment).

[Beowulf]

64-bit Vista will not run 16-bit apps.

Are you sure? I've been able to get some pretty old games running in 64-bit Vista (like Planescape Torment).

Yes, I'm sure. 64-bit Vista removes the code base required to run 16-bit applications. It uses what's called WOW64 to translate 32-bit calls into the 64-bit native calling structure. WOW64 is not able to do the translation for 16-bit code. Planescape Torment is likely an all 32-bit application, resulting in something that does actually run on 64-bit Vista.

[General Zod]

Huh. Oh well, that's what things like dosbox were invented for.

[Stark]

Wait, what...you mean Vista's hiding useful information from me? Dammit, I never expected that! Now to find out if my old 16-bit Norton Dashboard works on 64-bit Vista...I totally forgot about disk access times. Oops.

Just kidding about the Norton thing, too. If my laptop won't run TIE Fighter, it probably won't run system tools for Win95 too well either.

Vista isn't 'hiding' anything, you moron, your simplistic thinking is simply wrong. A process that uses 1% of your CPU time but constantly hits the drives with semi-random reads while you're trying to load 1gb of textures into a game. This is pretty common sense, and the nerd-reliance on zomg teh cpu timezzz is why defrag software can be sold for actual money despite being useless.

Also there's a new frontend/exe thingo for TIE Fighter that works fine.

[Starglider]

Fortunately this problem will be gone for good in another couple of years, as the performance of SSDs is not affected by file fragmentation. Though I'm sure there will be a few idiots out there who run third-party defrag tools on them with fetishistic abandon.

[Stark]

Remember, it's giving them a TINY PERFORMANCE BOOST in a VERY NARROW AREA. That's why they're better and smarter for doing something redundant.

[Ace Pace]

Remember, it's giving them a TINY PERFORMANCE BOOST in a VERY NARROW AREA. That's why they're better and smarter for doing something redundant.

The stupid stuff is that what they're gaining is what, 25ms on a level load time? If the game is anywhere near properly made, that'll be the only loading for the entire MP match. Retards who care about level load times crack me up.