As always, I'm late to jump on the failboat, and this time I've decided to do some serious maintenance on my computer. I've had enough of having to rely on System Restore and worrying that I've lost all of my data, or that my computer is on the brink of death. So, I'm going to start maintaining my system more, and that's  starting with keeping my hard drive as tidy and speedy as possible.

My buddy Island Dog pointed me towards a great tool called Defraggler, and this started my journey.  Essentially, it allows you to really control the defrag process from a drive and individual file level. It also includes the color graph that sadly, Vista removed. Obviously, this tool is pretty much only for power users, as I'm sure grandma doesn't even know the slightest about what a hard drive even is. Partly I'm glad that Vista streamlined the process of defragmentation, but I have a feeling normal users won't be doing it regularly until Windows does it for them or it's watered down to one huge button called "Drive Maintenence" that does Disk Cleanup, a defrag, and whatever else fun stuff Microsoft decides that your drive needs.  For users like me however, I like having a bit of control. Not too much though, I'm not a supervillian.

Anyway, Defraggler is a very neat app. It clearly presents the process, what files need to be moved around, and shows your data being moved around. It also allows you to switch the process priority from normal to background so I can actually use my computer during the process. This is nice for XP, while the visualization helps on Vista.  I find the color graph absolutely fascinating since I'm scared to death of low level stuff like this, but my mind does wonder how defragmentation works under the hood. Maybe someday I will be a supervillian after all...just definitely not using Linux to control my orbiting brain lasers.