I learned years ago if your going to use compression on your whole drive the best time to do it is right after you install the operating system and before all of your hard drive space is gone. Back then it was called DoubleSpace. While you would not get exactly double the hard drive space you would get perhaps 3/4 of that extra space added to your drive. Xp won’t report the drive size as getting bigger like it used to; A double spaced 10 gig would turn into a 20 gig, but it will report that your compressed volumes are decreased in size sometimes as much as half.. so it amounts to the same thing.

If you do use NTSF compression do it with a new hard drive and a new fast for today’s standards processor. I have had a machine compressed with a Dual Core Pentium 4 300 GHZ processor and a fast SATA drive, 4 gigabytes of Ram on XP 32 bit computer and there was no performance degradation that I could detect no matter what program or how many I was running. I never had any problems with corrupt files or system files.

WARNING: MAKE BACKUPS !

I haven’t had to use the NTSF compression too much but I am thinking about doing it to my this machine. But just for extra security I am going to back up my drive to an image using Ghost before I begin the compression. You don’t have to use Ghost or even make an image like I do but please back up the important files/folders/applications email etc that you want to save before compressing. Make sure if you don’t image the drive for easy restore, that you still have your Microsoft XP installation CD and Activation Key in good working condition. This is just in case something goes wrong and your system crashes during compression. After compressing your drive do continue to make some type of backup every time you have new files etc, you want to keep. I am not sure with XP if you can Uncompress the drive after compression and some people have reported problems with compression. Backups are essential.

All these people who say ‘Don’t Ever compress a drive’ and ‘I can’t believe someone is suggesting compressing a drive’ are full of hogwash. If you do it right and protect your files, you cannot go wrong. You may not get the added space you think you should get depending on the type and amount of files your compressing, but NTSF compression IS a trusted Microsoft tool made to work with your XP system and used correctly you should never have a problem with it.

I would like to thank the author for posting the article and may I suggest for a future article the many virtues of using a Ram Drive in today’s modern computers.. ( like using it to free up the 1/2 or 3/4 gigabytes of unused ram above 3 gigabytes on a 4 gigabyte system, by using the PAE switch in boot.ini … having a 768 megabyte ram disk using otherwise unused ram is a win win situation)