Pros & Cons of compressing the Operating System [Moved from News]

I'm just trying this on the old Acer I mentioned earlier. Currently it has been running for two hours and now reports '1day remaining' as the estimate of how long it might take. My Dell laptop did all this in 15 to 20 minutes.

Watch this space

So in the end it finished after around 3.5 hours. This is on W8.1 and a lot of text has turned blue. Will see how it performs as and when I use it. The space saving overall was modest.

Something worth considering is compressing other things rather than just the OS. For example you can compress program files and knock off a couple of GB just for Office and WindowsApps. I also compressed the game POE2 from 48 GB to 16GB and it made no difference in terms of run speed.

For example here I have 4GB left here after installing 42GB of stuff on a 32GB partition.



Don't use NTFS compression (it is terrible) - use the same compact command as for the OS compression but specify directory and compression algorithm.

For example :

Code:

compact /c /a /i /s /exe:xpress8k "c:\program files"\*

I compress everything unless it makes it slower as I'm very limited by disk space. Sometimes it doesn't help (and sometimes it doesn't work) but it is always worth a try.

The only thing woth noting if you want to play around with it is that you can't compress the whole of C:\Windows using compact.exe as the driver is not loaded early enough during boot. There are a few objects (hal.dll etc) that can be read if you use NTFS compression but not XPRESS*. You can however compress things like Assembly and Fonts no problem.

What is the reason for this compression?
Is it to conserve disk storage space?
(I'm puzzled because the OP suspects he's seeing performance improvement, which seems odd to me.)

TairikuOkami said:

When I compressed OS, I noticed quite an annoyance, the font on webpages turned out to be really ugly.

CompactOS does not compact fonts directory. I do compress it but I have to take ownership first as it is owned by TrustedInstaller (then restore after of course).

I think your problem may be due to something else as I never saw it.

It is always fun to play with these things anyway.

margrave55 said:

What is the reason for this compression?
Is it to conserve disk storage space?
(I'm puzzled because the OP suspects he's seeing performance improvement, which seems odd to me.)

I tried my best to actually test it. My laptop has a fairly fast SSD but it is only 120GB so space is important. That wasn't the point though. I wanted to see what was faster. I used various programs to time the startup of Word, Firefox, various games and found they were faster when everything was compressed (fast SSD and mediocure CPU). I then tried again using HDD and faster i7 and in all cases compression made performance better.

This was not what I expected. I thought compression could make it worse but it didn't.

My testing methodology was however a bit feeble as I forgot about caching and prefetch but I've not seen anyone do it properly.

I'd suggest though that at the very least if you are short of space try it on something not too contentious.

Compress MS Office (or some game) and see if it makes a difference. I'll tell you now though in my experience it will not - you will save space with no downside and a (debatable) upside.

I actually used the Acer for quite a while today as it happens, performing both basic office tasks (LibreOffice) plus printing and editing stuff and a little general web browsing. It seemed pretty decent all things considered, LibreOffice in particular opened much faster subjectively. Previously it could take... ages, perhaps 30 or 40 seconds. Everything worked well and as expected.
@margrave55 wonders what it was all about and how come I was trying this stuff. No real reason other than I got intrigued in other discussions in the 1809 thread. First up was compressed binaries and then I tried compressing the whole drive via disk properties. That compresses everything as I understand it.

Interesting to hear that @Ix07 suspected gains in some areas.