XP Disk Cleanup and Compress Old Files option

[Pretender]

Just curious as it isn't causing any problems. Why will Disk cleanup not gain the 1,519,616 disk space from the "compress old files" after Disk cleanup has been ran? A Duh on my part?!? :(

[bigc73542]

-{ Quote: "Just curious as it isn't causing any problems. Why will Disk cleanup not gain the 1,519,616 disk space from the "compress old files" after Disk cleanup has been ran? A Duh on my part?!? :(" }-
The amount of space gained would depend on what percentage of compression it achives. It can not gain all of the space back as it can not be compressed to zero. ;)

[bigc73542]

-{ Quote: "Just curious as it isn't causing any problems. Why will Disk cleanup not gain the 1,519,616 disk space from the "compress old files" after Disk cleanup has been ran? A Duh on my part?!? :(" }-
You will notice that it says you can regain up to that amount it doesn't say you will. It all depends what kinds of files and some other factors as to how much disc space you will actually regain.

[Pretender]

-{ Quote: "You will notice that it says you can regain up to that amount it doesn't say you will. It all depends what kinds of files and some other factors as to how much disc space you will actually regain." }-


Sounds good to me! Thanks BigC

[r00ted]

yep, it largely depends on "files" ;) for example, TXT files can be compressed a LOT more than MP3 files ;) hehehe.

[Pretender]

Just wanted to note that I gain 0% disk space after running disk cleanup.

The 1,519,616 remains constant.

[bigc73542]

-{ Quote: "Just wanted to note that I gain 0% disk space after running disk cleanup.

The 1,519,616 remains constant." }-
Just after reading your post here I went to cleanup and had 817.953kb that could be cleaned, after cleaning there was something like 53kb that didn't clean.

[Pretender]

That's quite a diff on your machine. Don't quite understand what's going on with mine. Don't need the space...........but sure curious.

[bigc73542]

-{ Quote: "That's quite a diff on your machine. Don't quite understand what's going on with mine. Don't need the space...........but sure curious." }-
You might want to give a third party cleaner a try and see if it will take it out.

[NICK ADSL UK]

Hi all :)
I would not muck about with the compress old files feature and it is very Wise to always leave that box unchecked. As that part of windows can be troublesome to a lot of forum members on the net today. Please bear in mind that DISK CLEAN UP will not work at all if you play around with compress old files. So the best thing to do is to use the disk clean up making sure the compress old files box is unchecked. If however it should go wrong a fix is available so do not worry

[HandsOff]

Hey Pretender-

Just thought I'd throw this in. I personally don't use windows compression much sort of, for the same reason that NICK ADSL UK said. In my case the reason is that i do not know all of the "special case scenarios" involved in duplicating or resizing partitions that have compressed files but there seems to be a general consenses that the sould be decompressed first, which i would be likely to forget to do...
anyway, I wanted to see how much space i would save if I formatted a partition in xp to "save space by compressing files" then transferred some movies i had on another drive. Well, I am sure I must have gained some, however in windows explorer the file sizes appear unchanged. Apparently, windows refers to the uncompressed size as far as bookkeeping. Otherwise, think of the confusion? for windows to use a file it first decompresses it...and when you close it compresses it again. But...what size is it then? If you had a full partition with all the files compressed then perhaps it could not open any of them? I think windows is right to use the uncompressed size in the Windows Explorer, otherwise it is misrepresenting the capacity of the drive. I am sure you already know that when you click properties of a file it will give you two sizes, "size" and "size on disk".
Perhaps thats whats happening to you. if you compare the "size on disk" before and after, does it change? Let me know so i can sleep tonight!

- HandsOff