Looking for advice re: NTFS Compression (XP Pro)

[iminj]

My R40 (20Gb drive) is filling up. Before I replace it with a higher capacity drive, I'm doing some cleanup of unused files, and I am considering trying WinXP Pro's NTFS Compression utility.

I want to avoid performance degradation. I am thinking it's safe to compress folders containing my MS Office documents and spreadsheets and also my MP3 and JPG files. I will not compress the Windows or Program Files folders.

Can anyone advise me about the pros & cons of compressing the 2 large ThinkPad folders - "IBM TOOLS" and also "DRIVERS"?

Thanks.

[davidspalding]

It can take a while, but I've changed file and folder properties on an entire drive's contents to compress, and it can give you quite a lot of free space after. A few files won't allow being compressed, so you'll want to peep in from time to time. There are a LOT of files in your \Windows folders, and \Program Files\ particularly, which can free up room when you compress them.

Frankly, if you've got GBs of data being used by the Software Installer folders (C:\DRIVERS, etc.), you could offload those to a USB drive until you run an update again. You may have duplicates, too. I've gone searching in each folder and found 3 versions of Access Connections left there; very untidy, IBM!

There ought'n't be very much overhead running NTFS compression, it's quite fast -- not at all like the old days of programs the names of which I hardly remember.

Before you do this, though, run Disk Cleanup. A trick: Start, run, "cleanmgr /sageset:1" (without the quotes), and you can pick the options you'd like to run on any connected drive. DESELECT compression, but select as many of the others that you feel comfortable with. Click OK. Now run "cleanmgr /sagerun:1" and watch it go. You should have more room on your hard drive.

Before doing any of this, I'd suggest a good, reliable backup. A cheap USB drive ought to come in handy.

You can run cleanmgr /sagerun:1 from time to time, even save it as a shortcut or a scheduled task. Good precursor to running DFRG.MSC ( Disk Defrag).

[iminj]

Terrific advice David ! Thanks.

I was able to clean almost 300Mb from my C:\DRIVERS and C:\IBMTOOLS directories ... mostly by manually finding and deleting older installation versions left behind by the Lenovo Software Installer. On the remaining folders, I went in and deleted all the language folders that I never use. This was tedious, but I cleaned up a few more Mb with this.

Once I realized that NTFS Compression is reversable (just in case it did adversely affect performance), I decided to compress my entire drive. It took about 1 hr ... with many popups for in use files not permitting compression (especially in C:\Windows\System32\ .. which makes sense). This saved me an additional 500Mb.

I already use cleanmgr regularly, and recommend it as well.

Picking up 800Mb on a 20 GB drive was definitely worth the effort. Thanks again.

[davidspalding]

Another fun excursion ... open Explorer, navigate to c:\winnt or c:\windows and see how many folders that start with $ you see. these are rollback folders for updates, patches and hotfixes. Select all and hit ALT + ENTER to see how much space they take up. They are safe to delete so long as you don't need to undo any Windows Update patches. (119 mb on my system which is all of 6ix months old.)

BTW, MP3s, WMAs, and JPGs aren't compressible, likewise AVIs and some other multimedia types. Storing those on a USB drive will free up plenty of HDD space.

[dsigma6]

i just deleted everything in windows folder that started with "$" and you destroyed my computer.

ok im just kidding relax! it freed up 600MB!!!