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WinXP NTFS- Built in compression?

JEDI

JEDI

Lifer
my 500mhz laptop is only 10 gigs. I have xp, office2k, and a few other business software. i'm down to 1gig of free space.

i'm using fat32. if i convert to ntfs, is it auto-compression? or do i need to manually do it?

and how much compression can i expect? (i dont have games, or pics/movies on this laptop.)
 
You have to choose for it to compress them in the drive properties. However I believe when a file is compressed and needs to be used it is then uncompressed. This may result in reduced performance so I would not reccomend compressing the whole drive.
 
Agree with KoolDrew. You really need a bigger drive - at least 20GB. Have you considered an external USB drive and move your programs and data to it - leaving only the OS on the 10 gigger?
 
Originally posted by: corkyg
Agree with KoolDrew. You really need a bigger drive - at least 20GB. Have you considered an external USB drive and move your programs and data to it - leaving only the OS on the 10 gigger?
Click to expand...

lugging an external hd defeats the purpose my purpose of having something easy to carry around on business trips w/minimal accesories.

so how much slower would things be if i compressed the whole drive? and how much compression can i expect?
 
I agree that the whole drive should not be compressed; but for stablilty reasons rather than performance reasons.

I do suggest that you compress other parts of the drive as that will help you to save some space. As for how much you could expect it depends entirely on what you are compressing. If it's pure text files that you compress it's not uncomon to see 3:1 compression; if it's files that are already compressed like video or most Image formats you likely wouldnt see any space savings.

As far as performance I'm going to guess that the old 10GB laptop harddrive you have is very slow. If that's the case you could actually see a performance increase by using compression on the disk (in certain situations) as it shifts some of that workload off to the processor. The processor isnt exactly fast, but it's faster than the hard drive.

I would start with your documents and files, temporary internet files might not be bad either. You should also look for things that you use infrequently and compress that.
 
However I believe when a file is compressed and needs to be used it is then uncompressed. This may result in reduced performance so I would not reccomend compressing the whole drive.
Click to expand...

Depends. The file only needs to be uncompressed into memory as long as it's not modified, so if the CPU can decompress files faster than the disk can read them the compression might cause an increase in performance.
 
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