Windows Vista Vista Defrag Anomaly

Vista Home Premium-SP2 on Dell Studio Laptop. Hard Disk 250GB (with recovery partition) -
Disk Defrag Analysis from Command Prompt shows 0 percent file fragmentation ans says 'you do not need to defragment this volume'
Disk analysis with third party program such as Defraggler shows disk defragmentation as 59 percent. Does this make sense?
I'm afraid I'm not very experienced with Computers so I don't understand this discrepancy.

 

The Vista defragger does not consider file fragments larger than 64MB as 'fragmented', by default, but third party utilities don't use this criteria when they analyze. That's where the discrepancy comes in..vista reports one thing and a third party utility reports something else altogether. You can see a detailed analysis by using the command line defrag options.

As suggested above, pick one defragger and stick to it. Earlier when I used to have Vista (all XP now, and waiting for 7), Diskeeper 2008/2009 was the defragger I used; was automatic and worked nicely (not free though).

 

I like a program called Puran Defrag. It's not free - but has a simple user interface and the boot time defrag is nice too when needed. It can do automatic defrags in the background on the fly - but I'm always afraid that will steal resources so I just defrag manually once a week. But as suggested I'd stick with one defrag program - you'll drive yourself crazy switching back and forth between programs and checking the fragmentation rate.

 

I too will give Diskeeper my vote.