File defragmentation tools: WinContig vs Defraggler

Defragmenting the whole drive is time consuming and to a large extent very unrewarding, as you can only gain a few milliseconds of access time at best. Defragmenting individual files is a far better strategy. My Documents folder is taking too long to open? Defragment it. The movie file is badly fragmented? Defragment it and leave the rest. It’s time saving and logically more sound than whole drive defragment.

I have written about a file defragmentation tool called Defraggler earlier. Another such tool that I came across recently is WinContig. WinContig is a stand-alone defragmentation tool for Windows that lets you quickly defrag files and folders without having to defrag the whole disk.

One useful feature in WinContig is the ability to group files and folders together and save it as a profile. So if you frequently defrag a certain collection of files, you can group them together and save it as a profile. The next time when you need to defragment those files, you only have to load the saved profile.

When I compared WinContig to Defraggler I found that both tools has certain pros and cons over each other.

Features	Defraggler	WinContig
Defrag files, folders and drives	YES	YES
Defrag free space	YES	NO
Defrag strategy	1	2 (Quick & Smart)
Visual representation	YES	NO
Automatically clean temporary files before defragmentation	NO	YES
File exclusion list	YES	YES
Save file list as profiles	NO	YES
Scheduler	YES	NO
Automatic PC shutdown on completion	YES	YES
Portable	YES	YES
Freeware	YES	YES

Conclusion: As you can see, both the tools offer different feature sets. WinContig is more advanced with options like “automatically clean temp files”, “file profiles” and "quick defrag" modes making it a favorable choice. But I will miss the “free space defrag” of Defraggler. Also watching the colorful blinking dots in Defraggler when the defragmentation is in progress has a pleasure of it’s own.

I will keep both and use them depending on my need at that particular time.