Windows XP Professional: The Missing Manual

Compressing Files and Folders

Although the hard drives made these days have greater capacities than ever, programs and files are much bigger, too. Running out of disk space is still a common problem. Fortunately, Windows XP Pro is especially effective at compressing files and folders to take up less disk space.

POWER USERS’ CLINICCreating a New Spanned Volume

The flexibility of dynamic disks never ends. If you find yourself with bits of unallocated space on two or more dynamic disks, you can actually sweep these scraps together into a single new volume—a spanned volume—that behaves, in Windows, as though it’s a single “hard drive.”

To do this, start in the Disk Management window (Figure 15-2). Right-click any unallocated space on any of the disks and select New Volume from the shortcut menu. On the Select Volume Type screen, click the Spanned option. On the Select Disks screen, the unallocated space you clicked appears in the Selected column, and any unallocated space on other dynamic disks appears in the Available column, which is shown here.

Compressing files and folders can also be useful when you want to email files to someone without dooming them to an all-night modem-watching session. That’s why Microsoft has endowed Windows XP with two different schemes for compressing files and folders: NTFS compression for storing files on your hard drive, and zipped folders for files that ...