How in the Tech

Adding Defrag to Right-Click in Vista

By Adam Myers ⋅ August 22, 2008 ⋅ Tags: disk defrag, registry editor, vista tips, vista tweaks

One of the new features introduced in Vista is the notion of auto defragment of your harddrive. Briefly, defragging a harddrive involves scanning the disk and relocating all the data belonging to a file so that it is contained in one continuous block. This generally causes a performance gain as it is much faster for a harddrive to read files in a smooth motion rather than seeking back and forth on the disk to assemble all the bits of a file you are trying to access. In previous versions of the defrag utility on Windows, it was left up to the user to perform this task. That has changed in Vista, where it happens in the background unbeknown to the user. In reality, it isn’t running all the time but rather on a schedule and if you want to easily run it on demand, here is a way to add the defrag option to your right-click options on a harddrive.

1. Click Start and in the Start Search box type regedit.exe
2. Traverse the Registry Editor navigation tree on the left hand side down to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell



3. Create a new key by right-clicking on shell titled runas and set it’s default value to Defragment.





4. As in Step 3, create a new key under runas titled command and set it’s default value to defrag %1 -v.





5. Lastly, exist Registry Editor to save your changes.

Now in Vista Explorer, when you right-click on any harddrive you will see the option of Defragment which will launch the Command Line version of Disk Defragmenter.

If you want to be notified the next time I write something please subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for reading!

Related Posts

• Bringing Back “Search…” Menu Item After Vista SP1
• Using drfgui to Disable Vista’s Automatic Disk Defrag
• Tuning Windows Vista for Increased Performance
• Supercharge Vista Explorer Preview Pane
• Removing Broken Entries from Windows Add/Remove List