Guys,
few questions
what saves more space compressing or compact os
i did a few clean installs and one time it was in the compact state another time it wasn't and some times compressing the folder actually made it bigger so just wondering...
What are you asking? Did you look into it and found something you couldn't understand?
compact /compactoscompacts some (but by no means all) files in the C:\Windows directory using the xpress4k algorithm. It does nothing with user files.
xpress4k is one of the options on thecompactcommand all of which result in smaller compressed files than NTFS, but it is worse than xpress8K, xpress16k or LZX. Conversly xpress* use less CPU to extract than LZX. These other compression options are only avaliable manually where you specify the directory and if you use them the directory prompty forgets it is supposed to be compressed and so no new files are compressed at all.
Generally speaking NTFS compression is terrible and should not be used these days. You'll have to check performance for yourself but xpress8k or xpress16k will probably be the most efficient for any PC made in the last decade.
I use xpress16k (for most things) and then flag the directory with default in case I forget to re-do it.
Something like
$folder='C:\Users\Whatever'
compact /c /s /a /f /q /i /exe:xpress16k $folder\*
then
compact /c $folder
It is about the algorithms that Microsoft is using. Windows 10 Feature Focus: CompactOS Compact OS, single-instancing, and image optimization | Microsoft Docs
CompatOS uses another compression algorithm 4K XPRESS Huffman instead LZNT1 (NTFS compression), so compression is better,
- files compressed by CompactOS are not shown in blue,
- compression may make reading and writing files slower due to it loads CPU more strongly.
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