Deep Fragged

I am currently in the "wait" stage of my usual two-stage working routine: "hurry up" and then "wait". So I'll pass the time by bitching about Microsoft Disk Defragmenter.

Disk Defragmenter made some serious improvements when it was released as part of Windows 2000, but the strangest new feature was that it demanded 15% of free space on your disk in order to work "effectively", whatever that meant. And you couldn't just find 15% of free space on your hard disk and let Disk Defragmenter do its thing. No, it had to have 15% of "space usable by Disk Defragmenter". Again, D.D. didn't bother telling you what the difference was.

Last night, I stripped the hell out of my workstation in order to get 15% of usable free space on a 3 GB drive. Good-bye MS Office. Good-bye anything that was written by Adobe. I think I had to pitch Mozilla Thunderbird, too. Towards the end, I had 20% free space and D.D. was still bitching about only having 14% of wiggle room.

God dammit, Disk Defragmenter. What's it take to make you happy?

I finally pruned my disk down to 21% free space, and D.D. stopped complaining. It proceeded to defrag all of about sixty files and then it had the gall to tell me that defragmenting was complete. The Disk Defragmenter bar was still four-fifths red. The other one-fifth was green. (Why Microsoft chose green to represent immutable system files and blue to represent "the opposite of red", I'll never know. Green seems like a better choice to me. As in "all lights are green". But then again, I don't support the red state/blue state two-party political system in the U.S., either.)

So, pissed off at Disk Defragmenter's half-assed job, I ordered it to defrag again. And again, it did about sixty files. I kept pressing "Defrag" until the bar was blue enough to my liking.

The next day, I put Office and Thunderbird back on my machine. This, naturally, whittled my free space away, from 21% to 17%. I opened Disk Defragmenter again. The new files I'd added were all there, laughing at me from behind their broad red bars.

Time to defrag.

With 17% free space and a truckload of defrag operations just hours earlier, I was wondering if that would, by the slightest chance, help Disk Defragmenter find its tipping point of 15%. Nope. 14% was the best it could do. I commanded it to defrag anyway. And on the 100MB of files or so that it cleaned up, it did a beautiful job of it.

So what's the deal? 21 will get you 15, 17 will get you 14. 15 gets you a piss poor defrag, 14 gets you a nice solid band of blue. This does not make sense.