CHANGELOG - Notepad

Disk Defragmenter Changelog

This document contains late-breaking release notes for Disk Defragmenter. For best results, read it in a small window while something defragments in the background.

: Desktop icons, closable windows, Run

  • Desktop icons now work as in Windows 98: a click selects one and a double click opens it, while on a touch screen one tap opens it. Disk Defragmenter has a desktop icon too.
  • Windows can now be resized, and Close now closes Disk Defragmenter. Open it again from its desktop icon, from System Tools in the Start menu, or by typing defrag in Run.
  • Run... in the Start menu now opens the Windows 98 Run box. Type defrag to open Disk Defragmenter or bsod for a blue screen, and anything else gets a "Cannot find the file" error.

: A Windows 98 Start menu

  • The taskbar now has a Start button that opens the Windows 98 Start menu, with Disk Defragmenter under Programs, Accessories, System Tools.

: A Win95GPT shortcut and ScanDisk

  • The desktop now has a Win95GPT shortcut that opens win95gpt.com, a Windows 95 ChatGPT client made by Jimi Plouffe, in a new tab.
  • The blue screen now restarts through ScanDisk, which checks drive C before Windows 98 comes back. Exit skips the scan.

: Full screen, aka screensaver mode

  • Start can now take the page full screen and keep your screen awake until the run ends. Turn it on in Settings.

: Taskbar with clock, mute and minimize

  • The desktop now has a taskbar with a clock and a speaker icon that mutes every sound.
  • The window can now be minimized, and a defragmentation keeps running while it is.

: Clearer block movement

  • A How It Works shortcut on the desktop opens the page of the same name. Until now the only way in was the About dialog.
  • A Realistic restart now keeps most of the finished work: only 2 to 5 percent of the data comes back fragmented, where earlier restarts undid up to a third.
  • The cluster map now shows green reads before red writes, then lets the blocks settle into place. These phases share each pass's time budget, and Pause freezes the phase you are watching.

: RPM replaces IOPS

  • Drive speed is now shown in RPM instead of IOPS, the number that was really printed on a hard drive's box in 1998. The four drives and Drive G's speed range, 3600 to 15000, were recalibrated to match, so pass and run times changed along with them.

: Custom drive

  • Added Drive G, a drive you size yourself. Set its capacity and speed in Settings under Select drive, and the estimate updates as you change them.
  • Realistic mode now stays finished after the completion box closes, like the Windows 98 utility. Its mid-run interruptions still rescan the drive and lose ground.

: Movable windows and Windows 98 metrics

  • Made every window draggable by its title bar, dialog boxes included. The Move command on the shortcut menu nudges the window with the arrow keys, Enter keeps the spot and Esc puts it back.
  • The title bar has a shortcut menu: right-click it, click its icon or press Alt+Space. Size and Minimize are listed greyed out, since there is nowhere for the window to go.
  • Message boxes now show the warning symbol, disable their close box when there is no Cancel button and default to No when you are asked whether to stop. Settings has OK and Cancel only, and the About and Unsupported Device boxes close with OK.
  • Title bars, the spacing between controls, the progress bar border and the scroll bars now measure what Windows 98 measured, and text is black rather than dark grey.
  • The Notepad pages drop the .TXT from their title bars, underline the access keys in their menus and turn visited links purple. Each release on this page now carries a short title.
  • The Notepad pages now link to the support page.
  • The corner watermark is now a desktop shortcut for Buy Me a Coffee. Right-click it for Open, or right-click the desktop for Hide Desktop Icons.

: Realistic simulation mode

  • Settings has a new Simulation mode box. Realistic moves 6 clusters a pass instead of 24 and starts over whenever the drive's contents change, so drive C takes about thirty eight minutes.
  • The completion box asks for a coffee on the first run and every third one after. The other runs just say the drive is done.
  • Added a README explaining how the defragmentation is simulated, linked from the About box. It also corrects which drive takes the longest: C, not E.
  • The Unsupported Device notice now appears only on your first visit. Your device is still unsupported, but you have been told.
  • Every window now underlines a letter in its controls, and Alt plus that letter presses the one you want. Alt+S starts a defragmentation and Alt+T stops one.

: Startup screen and faster passes

  • Choosing to restart your computer now shows the Windows 98 startup screen while the new version loads. Your computer is still not restarted.
  • Data in the way is now moved aside first, up to 24 clusters at a time. Passes no longer arrive on a fixed timer, so the drive works in fits and starts.
  • Added this document.

: Restart prompt for new versions

  • A new version of Disk Defragmenter now asks whether you would like to restart your computer. No computers are restarted.

: Privacy policy and home screen icons

  • Added a privacy policy. Summary: the drives are imaginary and nothing about you is collected.
  • Added proper icons and screenshots for people who install Disk Defragmenter to a home screen.
  • The drive map now redraws correctly when the window moves to another monitor or the page is zoomed.

: Title bar and notched screens

  • Double-clicking the title bar now maximizes the window, as it should.
  • Added support for telephones with a notch in the screen, a sentence that would not have parsed in 1998.

: Smoother drive map

  • Rewrote the drive map renderer so large drives scroll smoothly. Fixed certain iPads refusing to draw drives over 1 GB.

: Works offline

  • Disk Defragmenter now works entirely offline. You may defragment an imaginary drive on an aeroplane.

: Remembered sound preferences

  • Sound preferences are now remembered between visits.
  • KNOWN ISSUE: pressing the Close button may occasionally cause a fatal exception (blue screen). This behavior is authentic and will not be fixed. Press any key to continue.

: Rewritten defragmentation engine

  • Rewrote the defragmentation engine to match the real Windows 98 utility. The read head scatters, and the progress bar reveals one segment at a time.
  • Stopping a defragmentation now asks for confirmation first.
  • Re-encoded the hard disk sound to period-appropriate fidelity, which saved 850 KB.

: Rebuilt program

  • Rebuilt the whole program. It now loads considerably faster.

: Mouse click sounds

  • Added mouse click sounds.

: Hard disk sound switch

  • The hard disk sound can now be switched off, for people defragmenting at work.

: Hard disk sound effects

  • Added authentic hard disk sound effects. Faster drives click faster.
  • Defragmentation now moves several clusters per pass.

: Estimated time remaining

  • Added the estimated time remaining, which is approximately as truthful as the original.

: First release

  • First release. Four imaginary drives (C:, D:, E:, F:), one legend, no files harmed.

Disk Defragmenter is simulated by Defrag98, a nostalgia project by Dennis Morello. It never reads, moves or modifies any real file on your device.