May 2002
Beginner
584 pages
18h 18m
English
Content preview from Windows XP Home Edition: The Missing ManualBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Compressing Files and Folders
Windows XP is especially effective at compressing files and folders to reduce the space they occupy on your hard drive—which is ironic, considering the fact that hard drives these days have enough capacity to stretch to Bill Gates’s house and back three times.
Even so, compressing files and folders can occasionally be useful, especially when hard drive space is running short, or when you want to email files to someone without dooming them to an all-night modem-watching session. Maybe that’s why Microsoft has endowed Windows XP with two different schemes for compressing files and folders: NTFS compression and zipped folders.
NTFS Compression
If Windows XP was installed on your PC when you bought it, or if you upgraded your PC from Windows 2000, or if you erased your hard drive before installing Windows XP, then your hard drive is probably formatted using a software scheme called NTFS (short for NT file system; see page 532 for details).
In general, you can live a long and happy life without knowing anything about NTFS. Now and then, however, you’ll read about one feature or another that is available only if your hard drive was prepared using this system—and this is one of those cases.
Tip
To find out whether or not your hard drive uses NTFS formatting, choose Start→My Computer. Right-click the your hard drive icon; choose Properties from the shortcut menu. In the resulting dialog box, you’ll see either “File system: NTFS" or “File system: FAT 32.” (If it ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.