Double your hard drive space

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link's dead... If you use windows xp (not sure if vista can do it), you can do this sort of stuff by going in to properties and doing something like "compress drive to save disk space" on the main top level drive icon from "my computer" or below that in folders doing something like "compress contents to save disk space"

For external drives or internal drives OTHER THAN THE MAIN SYSTEM ONE (USUALLY C this is fine... BUT NEVER, EVER COMPRESS YOUR MAIN OS SYSTEM'S HARD DRIVE UNDERS WINDOWS!!!! I tried that once, and found that while you technically "can" do it, it'll make your computer become super sluggish and require that you more or less resort to a restore cd or operating system install cd to get things back to normal speeds... I think this super level of compression only works if the drive is set up as NTFS, not FAT... It will compress and save you loads of space, but it makes accessing that drive a lot slower so you never want to do it on drives that hold the main system or any folders that contain programs that you need to use a lot that use a lot of ram or cpu usage since the compression technique itself uses tons of ram so it adds a lot to the ram and cpu usage to uncompress and do that on top of everything else you are asking the computer to do.

We've compressed on the system drive under Windows, and have been successful at doing it. You have to be careful at which folders are allowed for compression. Document folders, etc are fine. You want to stay away from compressing the actualy system folder (windows).

Compression on folders that store MP3's, and video's is a waste of time. They are not going to get any smaller.

hi, all your doing with doubling the hard drive space is compressing everything. its almost like zip files or rar files.when you say call up a your favorite game your machine unzips it in the back ground and when your done with it it compresses it back. its noting but a big problem waiting to happen. with drives cheap now a days why use compression or backup your stuff on a dvd and get rid of some the programs you don't use.

On most store bought systems they have a hidden partition which holds the files for system restore. If you have an installation disc you can delete this hidden partition and use this space for anything you want. I think this is what that link would have talked about if working. Compression just cannot get you double the space without massively slowing down the average machine.

Your better off buying a cheap external hard drive or an internal hard drive if you have an available bay "and" a power supply that can handle an extra hard drive. I've seen many systems with a decent video card, 2 optical drives and one hard drive crash when you added that second hard drive. This was because the power supply couldn't power everything. Dell computers on the lower end budget side really suffer from this which is why most new budget Dell computers no longer include the extra hard drive bay. If you cannot mount the drive you most likely won't be using it eh. I think my mothers 1100 desktop model has a very budget 250 watt power supply.

Most of the time the restore partitions are only a few GB's in size.

Andrewwski said:

Most of the time the restore partitions are only a few GB's in size.

Click to expand...

Quite true but I have seen systems that come with more bundled software along with double the space of the files to extract the image and do a checksum before the contents of the image is copied to the target partition.

In the example above the hidden partition was 20GB and was from a shopNBC computer system. The install images totaled around 6GB of space. The restore would only extract the image file onto the hidden partition and thus required 10GB of space for extraction. So at one point the restore was using 18GB of space while a checksum was completed on the extracted files. If the checksum passed those extracted files would be copied in a DOS envirement to the root C: partition. Once the system restore was completed the last step of the restore was deleting the extracted files from the hidden partition leaving just the image file untouched and in a read only and hidden attribute. This idea was short lived and soon after they had the restore files on a DVD Restore disc.

Beyond everything said above it would take a very powerful system with a very fast CPU with tons of memory to handle that kind of real time decompression and most likely decryption. Plus you have the downside of never being able to retrieve your data upon a full OS corruption because a new install of any OS will "not" be able to decrypt those old files. That is also assuming that compression software exists to allow savings in the gigabyte ranges because I doubt it and have never seen a solution either.