NTFS Compression on an Windows Install Tips

[Symion]

For those who want to try out the NTFS Compression on a Windows Install Drive mentioned in Yesterday's WAN show.   I've been doing it since XP and it has gained me anywhere from 5-12GB of space depending on the version of Windows.

You do it by right clicking the contents of the drive and going into the advanced menu and enabling the compression checkbox. You want to do this while doing *some other basic task on your system (web browsing is fine), as this will have the drive accessing all your important system files.

Why? Because it will halt on those important files and ask you if you're sure you want to compress them and you tell it No for all, otherwise Windows will throw a compressed bootmgr error when you restart. (This is by far the most pressing risk of doing this and be prepared to uncompress part of your boot sector especially if you try this on XP) The process has taken anywhere from One hour to six depending on the type of drive and the size of the Windows Install.

As for performance hit: When you first run the indexer on boot it will have to load up for about 30 seconds and sometime it will take as long when you open up My Computer (its pretty random) and I'd give the boot time about 5 seconds more by approximation otherwise you won't notice it in real world usage. Notable is the fact that almost all of the above no longer happens in Windows 8 which is probably why MS enabled the feature.