I am running a Hard Drive defragmentation program right now as we speak. Sure its great and gets the job done right, after a lot of trial and error. I am no guru on how these things work, but if the display is a replica of what your Hard Drive looks like, I wonder if there could be a way to copy/paste fragments and whole pieces into areas they would fit into with your mouse, that way the computer isn't searching and guessing and moving all the time. Visual warnings or hints could help you move pieces around and maybe tell you what would fit where. This probably wouldn't be for the faint of heart.
-- UhhOK, Mar 12 2002

Dunno if it would be quicker, but it would certainly be more entertaining.
-- DrBob, Mar 12 2002


To make this a really commercial product, your manual defragmentor should have a Tetris UI. Every time you play Tetris on your PC ("Ooh, this'll fit over here, and that'll fit just there" - see? - just like defragmenting), you're defragmenting the drive.
-- hippo, Mar 12 2002


Your P.C. isn't guessing at what goes where. While it's not interesting to watch, there is a method to the madness. If it seems a bit chaotic, remember that sometimes data has to be moved out of the way to make room for new (contiguous) data.
-- phoenix, Mar 12 2002


"Towers of Hanoi" would also make a good Manual Defragmentor UI...
-- hippo, Mar 12 2002


Get these ideas up there hippo, so we can vote for them.

How about a manual network routing mechanism, based on that Snake game you get on mobiles?
-- mcscotland, Mar 12 2002


This would be too much like those terribly annoying slide-puzzles, where you only have one open space to slide the other squares into, in some vain effort to try and get them in the proper order.
But there has to be some way of increasing the efficiency at which this is done. Back in my DOS 6 days, the defragger there would get hung up in near loops it seems, moving a mountain of data back and forth only to one unit. It was painful.
Here's another mystery. Why do we watch them? What is it about the defragmenter screen that keeps me perpetually glued to it, and makes me cheer when it's done? What's the lure?
-- RayfordSteele, Mar 12 2002


"Manual frag mentation" - sounds like a popular sport from long, long ago.
-- neelandan, May 02 2002


Someone here at work (not me) once tried to defrag while having an open Word document with auto-save set to 5 minutes.
-- angel, May 02 2002


Croissant - purely because the idea of me sat there, painstakingly defragging the 100,000+ files on my 120Gb HD amuses me.
-- CheeseFilteredCigarette, Jan 19 2003


The tetris frontend presents too much of a risk of data loss if the user accidentally were to fill a row.
-- footzilla, Apr 29 2003



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