Vista's defragmenter is automatic and does not show any progress graphically. On automatic defrag, it also does not ever seem to finish defragmenting the drive(s) however long it runs, which is real pity because it is a brilliant idea botched by Microsoft.

Windows (NTFS/FAT) does not prevent the fragmentation of files in real time as it writes to the disk, so the best way to fix this problem is to have an automatic defragmenter that cleans up after Windows..i.e monitors for fragmentation and defragments quietly in the background (without affecting other programs). Such a utility beats an old-fashioned manual defragmenter hands down, because it requires no user intervention and saves the user the time and hassle associated with manual defragging (especially multiple drives). It is the closest to real-time defragmentation and keeps drives free of fragmentation nearly always.

Ideally, this is what Vista's defragger should have done, but third party utilities seem to have pulled ahead in this race.