Reclaim control of your Defrag

I don't think I'm alone in being hugely disappointed by the defragmentation tool within Vista.  In XP and the versions before it you would at least get a status bar and at best a graphical view of your hard drive blocks and you could watch as files were shuffled around.  Now you get a swirly thing that keeps going (usually for hours) without so much as a "I'll be done soon".  Its true that now defragmentation happens regularly and usually without your knowledge, but I don't know about you but I like a bit more control over my drives.

Well, you'll be pleased to know that MS have actually left some advanced functionality in there for us to find - via the command prompt (yes that DOS looking thing).

If you type CMD in the search box it'll bring up the command prompt in the search results.  Right click on the prompt and run it as an administrator (assuming you're allowed to by the system's owner) and type "defrag" in the box.

You'll end up with this:

From here you can choose how you want to defragment your drive.  For example, type Defrag -c -w to defrag all of your drives fully.

When its running, you'll see this:

A lot more informative than the usual defrag box isn't it!