Windows XP Power Hound

Compressing Files and Folders

No matter how large your hard disk is, it's never big enough. Sooner or later, you're going to run out of space, which means constantly pruning files or installing an extra hard disk—both of which can seriously carve into your Solitaire time.

Good news: you can create extra hard disk space without spending a penny or deleting files. Simply compress your files so they're much smaller than their normal size. This section offers hints on saving space with compression.

Getting Extra Disk Space by Using NTFS Compression

A simple way to get more disk space is to use Windows XP's built-in NTFS compression—a scheme that only works with hard disks that use the NT File System (NTFS). (The steps later in this hint explain how you can find out if yours does.)

Note

NTFS, besides being an intimidating technical-looking acronym, merely stands for the disk-formatting system that Microsoft developed for Windows NT back in 1993. It represented a departure and improvement over the earlier DOS and its descendant, FAT, a system that previous versions of Windows ran on. Windows XP, advanced and versatile, can run on either a FAT or NTFS drive.

NTFS compression can shrink the size of individual files and folders or entire drives. Once you've compressed any of these items, Windows XP automatically decompresses them when you use them, and then compresses them again when it saves them. (Unless you have a slow computer, you won't even notice this process.)

But be careful about ...