Vista taking hours to defrag

[stevenrw]

My friend has a Vista lappy that looks like its never been defragged. Although the scheduler is set to run it weekly. I started defragging around midday today and its still running. Disc is 250gb and about 70% full (don't know why its got so full, I need to investigate that some more). I'm using the Windows defrag tool, which, in Vista has no status info, (bless 'em).
So - 2, maybe 3 questions for you good folk.
Should it take this long even if its never been run before
Can I stop it (cntrl alt del) without damage and restart in the morning
Is there a better free tool?

[Glenn]

It shouldn't take too long, but it does depend on how fragmented the file system is.

I prefer to use Auslogics defragger http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/

[zappaDPJ]

Yes you can stop it and probably should. If it's taking that long there might be some damaged sectors or there simply isn't enough space left on the drive for it to defrag efficiently. It could also be that there's something running in the background, hogging all the resources. I'd check the general health of the laptop before running it again. Make sure that it's virus free and that there's nothing running in the background. Remove as much dross as you can and then run defrag again.

[Technical Ben]

Yes and no. Depending on the hardware and system it can take a LONG time. Though in general it should not. As the more knowledgeable than me (Glenn and Zappa, yep! ) have already pointed out, it could be a problem slowing it down or stopping it from working properly.

You can stop withotu a ctrl-Alt-del AFAIK too, just "cancel". If that does not work, it may have frozen/broken. 

Check how much free disk space there is first. 70% full should be ok. You can usually see the percentage of disk space fragmented, if this is high, it suggests that it's just slow because it has a lot to do.
Then check how much RAM the PC/Laptop has. Low amounts will slow down the defrag.
Check if the Task Manager shows high CPU use or similar that may suggest a program is slowing the PC down (say the virus scanner conflicting with the defrag).
Check the S.M.A.R.T warnings (ask if you wish to see how) of the disk to make sure it's working well.

The nice thing about other tools is they give you a visual representation. While MS decided this was not needed or something, some of us like a visual cue to how things work. It's why we drive with our eyes and hands, and not ears and noses. Which is why the Windows Command Prompt/Linux terminal is so foreign to me.

[stevenrw]

As always, thanks for everybody taking time to help - always appreciated.
Unfortunately she uses Norton,  so it may well be virus infected. That will certainly slow things down a bit, but I believe she has only recently renewed her license, so I probably can't convince her to go with a "proper" AV for the time being at least. I'll run a manual scan and pass it through Malwarebytes and see if that comes up with anything.
I may even pop out her drive, put it in a caddy and run a scan using my AV program (ESET) via usb, to see what that comes up with.
Technical Ben, I have the WD Data Lifeguard software (seems that an awful lot of lappys use WD Blue drives), and I've run it on my own system drives but other than the "Pass" parameter, the rest might as well be Greek to me.
Could you perhaps you could give me an indication of what parameter values would/should ring alarm bells when I run it on my friend's machine, or would any of those be accompanied by a "Fail" in any case?
Meantime I'll download and run Auslogics defragger in Safe Mode to ensure nothing conflicts. Thanks to Glenn for that tip.

[Technical Ben]

Others on this forum no doubt have more expertise than I do, but this is what I've found with laptops and disks so far...

If not a Virus, could just be Norton scanning every file fragment moved, would trash the performance doing that. As said quickly check Task Manager and Performance/Processes to see if anything is taking up lots of resources. If nothing is, and the Laptop scans clean for viruses etc, then check the hardware.

"HDDScan" displays Smart test data too. Choose the drive first and only click the "S.M.A.R.T." button, the other buttons delete files/test the disk fully, so should not be used on existing drives/data. http://hddscan.com/
It will give a list, and "good/bad/warning" on each, so not too technical, but will let you know where the, if any, problems are. If it's clear or only "warnings" it's fine.


Just click the "smart" button. Works if over usb too.

It will show a list like this:

Green is good. Warning means it may be degrading (but depends on the type) and red is probably a bad thing.

If it's completely clear, then something else is up, like it being... Vista.