A small Microsoft victory

Since Windows ditched any kind of visual representation in its disk fragmentation tool (at least on Vista and Windows 7), I've moved to a great freeware tool called Defraggler by the (generous) Piriform. As the pictures below show, this gives a handy pictorial overview of how well organised disk space on my various computers is.

However, in trying to defragment a persistent block island of discord on my laptop (Windows XP), I tested Defraggler against Microsoft's Disk Defragmenter. After a few rounds of Defraggler, there were a little more than 3000 files offering resistance, and Defraggler was unable to do anything about them. To see if it could do any better, I then let Disk Defragmenter have a go ...

... And, much to my surprise, it was able to lay waste to the rebelling files and decrease their number to a mere 58. So a small and rare victory to Microsoft. Of course, Windows possibly allows Disk Defragmenter access to fragments that are precluded by the default settings in Defraggler, but I can't see anything that immediately supports this hypothesis.

Still, given that I like pretty pictures of my hard disk, I think I'm going to keep using Defraggler, but with the hope that Microsoft wise up and reinstate a pictorial map.