Hello everybody I have a question about "Compress drive to save disk space" checkbox that's located in the general tab of the Local Disk properties. I just discovered this feature and decided to save some disk on my laptop but when I applied this feature. A progress bar dialog box appeared and started applying these settings to each of the file on my drive, which probably more than half a mil and in the progress bar it indicated that It would take several days until I have them all applied. So I thought "Do I really need this stuff, and will it anyhow slow down the running or lauching applications. And what is the significance of the disk space that would be saved? Roughly up to 25% or what? Another thing I've noticed was that when I cancelled the process after couple of hours of applying such feature, I noticed that instead of 28gb free it now shows 30gb free when I mouse over the local disk icon. But when I open the property dialog from it, it shows 25.7GB!! Why is that happening?

Checking the box and using compression will slow your computer down... how much depends on a lot of things like processor, disk space, memory, etc... The amount of space you save depends on the files you're storing. Graphic files, (JPG, GIF, etc... ) MP3 files and movie files will not compress down so you won't really be saving any space. Disk space is pretty cheap so you might want to look at getting an external USB drive or even upgrading your current drive.

I've read somewhere a long time ago that if your disk is slow and you're processor is very fast then it can fasten up the loading of programs video's etc as it doesn't need to pick up as much from the disk. So really its all about the cpu you have and disk. I'm still wondering however how much faster the cpu would need to be etc.

None of you know me, I'm not a member, but all it does is compress your files. If you are planning to use this option, it all depends on your disk speed. Not Processor. It has to decompress anything you access. It will load most of the decompressed stuff into the ram so it won't take up more space. It wouldn't speed anything up, if anything, slow your computer down. Only check it if you have good hardware, otherwise you will notice performance changes. Negative impact. And it is unhealthly for your drive as well. More reads and writes will be put into play and in turn wear down the drive faster.

In essence it is like yaking the information and squishing into a smaller package like those stupid space age bags you see on TV that you vacuum when their filled.

The advantage is now everything is moved into a more convenient space for allowing more storage but like our unknown friend above me there said it now has to "UNPACK" something every time you access it. So in Summary id you have a disc with a lot of things you want to keep but do not use very often use compress if you want to CRAM unnnn more in there. If oyu are a gamer and openthose games files on a daily basis then compression is your enemy because not your PC is doing twice the work to open everything it packed away.

When you move into your new house you put the dishes in the cabinet where you can easily reach them on a daily basis you do not eat then repack them into the moving boxes to save space so in all I would say noooo compression is not a "GREAT" idea just a minor selling point for systems that are so old they needed to make room for every extra mb they could. 1987 is over go buy something with more than 40GB of storage. Not a personal shot just a reality of need. In Yeshua Messia Bryan

BY disk compression is not a fine art, it's a terror ride in the making. Used to be a good idea in times of simple data compression, but those days are over.

Might want to use a free disk optimizer (http://bit.ly/4ChildHealth) we found from germany does a good job of sorting the files out

Hi. I recently tried to do this but then cancelled it as I felt it was unnecessary. I then went off my my computer for a few hours. When I tried to switch my PC back on it wouldn't boot up properly. I got a screen saying PEMS is compressed press ctrl + alt + delete to restart. I tried this and it didn't work. My PC is now screwed I think. Unless any of you guys could give me a response and help me out.

Hi. I recently tried to do this but then cancelled it as I felt it was unnecessary. I then went off my my computer for a few hours. When I tried to switch my PC back on it wouldn't boot up properly. I got a screen saying PEMS is compressed press ctrl + alt + delete to restart. I tried this and it didn't work. My PC is now screwed I think. Unless any of you guys could give me a response and help me out.

Dost thou have a recovery or installation disk for the operating system? If so, insert into the drive holder, power down, then restart pressing F8 for safe mode.

You might get lucky.

There is much mis-information out there about file compression and speed. In the old days of 286 processors, disk compression actually slowed down the computer. With current high-speed processors, the decompression algorithms actually run much faster than the disk drive can read in data, so compression speeds the computer. The most serious question about compression is related to data security. Corruption of a single bit can result in loss of the entire file for file compression or the entire disk for disk compression. Always have a full system backup before (or while) using disk compression.

Hi,
Disk compression will reduce the number of Read/Writes on the Disk, the compressed file (small in size due to compression) will be loaded into the RAM and then uncompressed, So practically it could increase the response time. But in other hand the compressed data can get corrupted in the process and the there is a high chance of even losing valuable data.
So one has to think if its really required to take the risk, is the data very valuable, can I afford to loose it worst come ?

Remember to take backup of all the important data, USB drives (Pen drives and External Drives) are very cheap now a days compared to few years back and they come in good capacities.
Njoy Computing.

Thanks to Countdorkula93. Great info from initial question. You've saved us a lot of investigative research with your post.