Defragmentation - Which Application is Correct?

That's an interesting observation.

Defragmentation has to do with at least 4 kinds of thing:
1. If a file is fragmented (has separate parts) or not (on piece): file fragmentation
2. If all files of a folder are behind each other: folder fragmentation.
3. If the free space is contiguous or not.
4. Typically for NTFS-system: the master file table (MFT).

More details in http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_optimization.htm

The analysis mode of Windows defrag will show #1 (red) and #3 (white). It doesn't show the relation between different files from the same folder.
My experience with Windows defrag is that it defragments individual files (#1, and reports about that) and tries to combine narrow blue stripes to bigger blue chunks, thus making larges contiguous spaces either occupied or free (#3), but doesn't report on it.

I don't know about Norton defrag. But if that concentrates on #1 and neglects #3, you'll see a lot of narrow blue lines in the GUI of Windows defrag and it might not like that.

You can get a much more detailed picture of the state of your hard disk, by running defrag in the command window:
defrag c: -a -v(substitute your drive letter!)
to run a verbose analysis.

It would be interesting to compare that output on three moments:
1. Before a Norton defrag
2. After a Norton defrag
3. After the Microsoft defrag
Only you can do that, and can't do the first on this particular partition. But you might be able to repeat the experiment on another partition and report on that?

Do you know how to copy from a command window to Windows (Notepad or Word)? That way, there's no need to retype everything!

Hope this helps.


Kees

If you are seeing payoff I'd investigate known issues with most versions of Windows which is the DMA or motherboard driver issues.

For instance my machine's performance out of the box was not so great until I manually searched for and installed a new motherboard driver package. What came with the machine was fine but wasn't that good. Microsoft for most will not find the driver for us.

The DMA issue is well discussed but some will look but not execute the simple procedure to get the best DMA level available. Windows silently moves to lower DMA settings without notice and has even been known to misreport the actual setting it uses. Full details at http://winhlp.com/node/10

Bob

Yea i never use windows defragmenter. But this product works for me: www.reapairacomp.com