Disk clean-up

Carlimited

Whenever I run disk cleanup, I gain disk space by compressing old files (among other things, but this is the biggest). What happens to these files (are they damaged), and if I gain so much space by compressing them, why aren't they compressed to begin with? I notice that they turn blue, but are the contents changed?

8T8

The compress old files function basically compresses the files rarely used on the system like you would with a ZIP or RAR archive they are not damaged in the process.

If you go to access one of the files it will decompress on the fly it's all transparent to the end user it's just with compression it will take a little longer to access the file because it must be decompressed first.

They aren't compressed to begin in the first place because of performance implications and data recovery plus the fact that hard drives have such huge capacities these days compression is simply not needed.

If you do have free space problems it may simply be easier & faster to go buy a 400GB HD.

Capt'n Midnight

Carlimited wrote:

I notice that they turn blue, but are the contents changed?

yes, it turns all your pictures and movies into p0rn

No the contents remain the same.
If you have more than 15% free space you don't need to compress stuff (15% being a rule of thumb)

spacemonger http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/v1x.php is a great util for telling you what is taking up space well worth running - amazing how many things you've copied and then forgotten about

golden rules
- don't delete programs, uninstall them
- don't delete something if you don't know exactly what it is.


if you need to compress stuff out of the way .7z beats .zip http://www.7-zip.org for it

Carlimited

8T8 wrote:

The compress old files function basically compresses the files rarely used on the system like you would with a ZIP or RAR archive they are not damaged in the process.

If you go to access one of the files it will decompress on the fly it's all transparent to the end user it's just with compression it will take a little longer to access the file because it must be decompressed first.

They aren't compressed to begin in the first place because of performance implications and data recovery plus the fact that hard drives have such huge capacities these days compression is simply not needed.

If you do have free space problems it may simply be easier & faster to go buy a 400GB HD.

I actually want to buy a new machine soon anyway - probably in about a year once Vista's first bugs get found. In a different question, how does WinZip (or similar programs) compress files, and when they DO, what happens to them? :cool:

8T8

Carlimited wrote:

I actually want to buy a new machine soon anyway - probably in about a year once Vista's first bugs get found. In a different question, how does WinZip (or similar programs) compress files, and when they DO, what happens to them? :cool:

The Wiki entry on Zip answers your query's.

Generally WinRAR (.RAR) and 7-ZIP (.7zip) outperform zip in terms of compression and are a lot more popular.

5uspect

Disk clean up on Windows is a pain in the ar$e also. CCleaner is a nice app for clearing out all those temp files, freeing up some space.

Carlimited

Thanks for the info!