Windows® 98 Unleashed

Compressing Disks with DriveSpace

Although hard disks have been getting bigger and cheaper over the years, they haven't kept pace with the ever-fatter programs that developers have been throwing at us. As a result, we have a new corollary to Murphy's Law: No matter how huge your hard disk seems today, you'll wish it was twice as big six months from now. Rather than dipping into your savings yet again, you can squeeze more storage space out of your current disk by using DriveSpace, Windows 98's disk compression program.

Disk compression is based on a complex mathematical algorithm (called the Lempel-Ziv algorithm) that searches a file for redundant character strings and replaces them with small tokens. Let's look at a simple example. Consider ...