I've been fooling around with large video files, lately, and came fairly close to filling up my 300 gb drive on my laptop. I'd noticed, too, that my laptop had been running poorly -- slow to boot up, slow to shut down, slow to load and run programs, programs stalling, etc. I assumed it was because I recently loaded a bunch of new video software (I'm trying to get my laptop to play ripped Blu-Ray disks from the hard drive).

Well, last night I decided to do a little maintenance. I deleted a bunch of the ripped Blu-Ray videos and other accumulated junk and then defragged the drive. My free space went from about 40 gig (a little over 10%) to 190 gig.

Well, lo and behold -- this morning I booted it up and it went like lightening. Everything is nice and perky again with no performance anomalies.

So, two suggestions to keep a Vista machine healthy and happy:

1. Watch your hard drive free space. If you're getting too full, delete some files and make some room.

2. De-frag regularly. I don't care what Microsoft says about auto defragging. I use the free Aulogics program, it didn't take all that long on my rather large hard drive, and the performance difference is stunning.

I thought you were going to say you threw your PC out the window.

Is there a risk to defragging? Can something go wrong?

Nope. Good defragging software can't hurt anything.

Just sold my less than one year old Vista computer and went back to XP. That's how I make my OS fly .

Thanks for posting this PTravel. I have just downloaded Auslogic's defrag program and despite my hard drive having recently been defragged by the built-in program, it was found to be still quite badly fragmented.

This program also appears to be much faster than Microsoft's built-in defrag program and does not appear to affect the speed of other programs running of the computer as much while it is running.

I'm about to run their registry defragger - keeping my fingers crossed that it won't mess anything up!

I'd be careful of registry defraggers. In theory, there is no need to either clean or defrag the registry. I use the Glary Utilities registry cleaner when I've had to manually remove programs because their uninstall features failed -- I don't like having empty or incorrectly-defined keys lying around and the Glary product removes them. A standard file defragger should treat the registry as a file and make sure all segments are contiguous. I think the value in defragging the registry internally, i.e. changing the sequence of keys, is questionable at best.

That's what I expected the solution to be. Works for me

Cheers.

Thanks for the info PTravel - in that case, I might leave off the registry defraggers and use the registry cleaner (I have had a few programs that I had to manually remove).

Agreed. Even defragmenting the registry as a file to make contiguous segments might be of dubious value. Unlike a standard file, the registry is not typically accessed in a contiguous fashion- more of a "peek" and "poke" at the various key/value pairs. Not as much need for contiguous memory as there really aren't substantial speed issues involved in registry access.

Cheers.

I face similar problems (slow to boot and shut-down etc....) with my Vista desktop. There were days when I wanted to toss it out the window. I do regularly defrag. I think my issues were (and still are) there are just too much crabs in the start-up folder. Much of which I did not intentionally put them there, nor do I know how they got in there. After I disable or uninstall some unfamiliar ones, boot up is a lot faster. Shut down is rather unpredictable. Sometimes quick, sometimes it takes forever.
I also disable all "auto this", "auto that".
That s aid, my Vista is not really "flying". I doubt it ever will! (I miss my XP)

You can use msconfig to prevent all the various things that want to start up from doing so.

I was expecting a link a 'flight' video, too.

I use CCleaner to clean my registry. Installers are worse than uninstallers in leaving dead registry keys.

Another idea I was thinking, he could buy a Mac and name it Vista.