Although it may not be the most significant change that the Microsoft has done with respect to windows vista, but the company has surely changed the way that operating system handles the disk defragmentation. The  developers at Microsoft, Rajeev Nagar and Matt Garson have written a lengthy article about the defragment process and how it differs between the three versions of windows.

Windows 7 shows progress while defragmenting disks unlike windows vista which didn’t show any progress while defragmenting disks. The defragmenting process can be terminated at any time without any adverse effect.

Windows 7 has the ability to defragment multiple volumes simultaneously and it automaticaly disables the defragmenting of the solid state disks as there is no need of defragmenting flash memory and continued write access could actually shorten its memory life. It supports the scheduling of the disk- defragmenting similar to Windows Vista which is by default  scheduled at  1:00 AM.

Also, it can relocate even those files which can’t be relocated in windows vista.

Overall, the disk defragmenter is improved a lot but still it misses those eye-candy graphical views while defragmenting that it used to show in Windows XP.