All Things PerfectDisk – and Defrag - Windows 7 defrag in a corporate environment

With all the buzz and positive reviews of Windows 7, one thing that hasn’t really changed are the limitations of the built-in defragmenter. And from a corporate perspective, the downside of the built-in is as stark as ever. I’ll look at a few of the limitations here.

The first major limitation of the Windows 7 defragmenter from a corporate perspective is the lack of centralized management and control. It’s simply not there, and for any enterprise wanting control over important issues, such as defragmentation, it won’t have it if it relies on the built-in Windows 7 defrag. No central configuring, no central scheduling, updating, managing and reporting. Whatever is happening or not happening, the IT manager and sytem admin won’t know about it until the distress call comes in from the field.

Typical of a corporate environment is the necessity to define groups for specific actions or rules. That won’t happen with the Windows 7 defragger unless you’ve got your sneakers on and make personal visits to the desktops. And all that work you did setting up Active Directory OUs? It won’t be applicable. You won’t have any information about fragmentation levels, free space levels, whether or not defragmentation is actually occurring or not. No warnings or alerts to let you know if a problem is looming. No easy troubleshooting from your management console to quickly access a remote system to address a problem. No enterprise statistics.

And if administrators want to give users the ability to defragment their own computers on their own? You’re going to need to give all those end users Administrator rights. Yikes. Yes, the Windows 7 defragmenter requires Administrator rights in order to run. Just about all the organizations we speak with say “no way” to that.

Another major limitation of the Windows 7 defragmenter is lack of flexible unattended operation. It doesn’t have much in the way of flexibility and background processing. It can be run manually, with the Admin restriction as noted above. Or, it can be run via very limited scheduling, and does not allow you the flexibility to control access to CPU or disk resources. The Windows 7 defragmenter has no ability to defragment only when the Winodws 7 screen saver is active or only when the system is idle - and these are some key features organizations typically are looking for. It comes automatically scheduled to run every Wednesday at 1:00 a.m.; however this may or may not ensure that defragmentation actually occurs. What if the computer is turned off at that time?

The fact that Microsoft put a defragmenter in Windows, including Windows 7, validates it recognizes the fragmentation problem it created with the file system, even as disks get larger. That does not mean they have a workable solution.

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