Compress or Uncompress Windows 10 with Compact OS

arachnaut · 28 Nov 2015

I encountered problems with PerfectDisk 14 boot-time defragmentation with the compact option on.
The error was a blue-screen 'Process1_Initialization_Failed' error.

When I turned it off, as the Perfect Disk support suggested, it worked OK.

My laptop has it disabled because it has a Solid State drive. Usually the SSD firmware already compresses stuff that it deems appropriate, so this is quite understandable.

I guess if you have plenty of disk space, there's no good reason to turn this on. Performance probably won't improve - the file may be smaller, but the decompress takes longer.

I think this is one reason the Windows 10 startup time seemed to be getting longer - all those stuff getting decompressed...

EDIT: Perfect Disk just got updated to fix this problem.

bbeelzebub · 30 Dec 2015

Ran this last night on my 2-in-1 that has only a 32gb card as the primary. Gave me back 3gb of space after all the updates were ran, drivers installed, etc. Between doing a clean install to rid myself of HP bloat and compressing the OS I now have 16gb free. I flirted with removing IE and some other stuff, but there was no discernible difference. I'd love to get a couple more gb free. :)

Cloudtime · 23 Apr 2016

Thanks a lot for this useful information! :)

lx07 said:

If your interested in saving more space I've also compacted these directories with compact /c /s /a /f /q /i /exe:xpress16k

Most other big directories I've tried seem to stop Windows booting or otherwise behave badly (programdata, appdata, system32\driverstore\filerepository for example) but these work OK.

Code:

$env:programFiles
$env:programFiles(x86)
$env:homeDrive\MSOCache
$env:homeDrive$env:homePath\Documents
$env:windir\Assembly
$env:windir\InfusedApps
$env:windir\Installer
$env:windir\Panther
$env:windir\SoftwareDistribution
$env:windir\System32\Catroot2
$env:windir\System32\LogFiles

Can anyone please tell me how to use this code in a script with the compact command?

Brink · 23 Apr 2016

Hello Cloudtime, and welcome to Ten Forums. :)

Here's how in a command prompt for those.

Code:

compact /c /s /a /f /q /i /exe:xpress16k %programFiles%
compact /c /s /a /f /q /i /exe:xpress16k %programFiles(x86)%
compact /c /s /a /f /q /i /exe:xpress16k %homeDrive%\MSOCache
compact /c /s /a /f /q /i /exe:xpress16k %homePath%\Documents
compact /c /s /a /f /q /i /exe:xpress16k %windir%\Assembly
compact /c /s /a /f /q /i /exe:xpress16k %windir%\InfusedApps
compact /c /s /a /f /q /i /exe:xpress16k %windir%\Installer
compact /c /s /a /f /q /i /exe:xpress16k %windir%\Panther
compact /c /s /a /f /q /i /exe:xpress16k %windir%\SoftwareDistribution
compact /c /s /a /f /q /i /exe:xpress16k %windir%\System32\Catroot2
compact /c /s /a /f /q /i /exe:xpress16k %windir%\System32\LogFiles

Cloudtime · 23 Apr 2016

Very awesome, thanks a lot for your super quick response

It's working like it should.

Brink · 23 Apr 2016

You're most welcome. :)

Soyabeaner · 16 Aug 2016

Just some info regarding the performance impact that CompactOS has on my own system:
On my Samsung 840 EVO 120GB SSD when I clean installed Windows 10 it has always been in the non-compacted state. After the Anniversary Update, it automatically changed to the compacted state for unknown reasons. I had to re-tweak a lot of settings in Windows 10 as each major update is almost essentially a new install all over. Everything seems to been fine, even my boot time seems a bit faster. Except for my shutdown time - it went from 5-6 seconds (with hibernation and fast startup disabled) to 11+ seconds. Just a moment ago I confirmed my theory that the cause of the longer shutdown was due to CompactOS by turning it off. Low and behold it changed to 2 seconds! My boot time remains the same, and my OS drive space usage only increased by around 1.5 to 2 GB. I'm keeping it uncompressed since I don't notice any difference in daily performance.

Results obviously vary between systems.

arachnaut · 17 Aug 2016

Just noticed that the Anniversary update changed my compactOS setting (which was 'never').
Apparently, 'never' means 'until we meet again'.

So, I needed to run this again:

ADMIN>compact /compactos:never

Technically, it wasn't compacted because this is the command sequence I saw/executed:

Code:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>compact /compactos:query
The system is not in the Compact state but may become compact as needed.

C:\WINDOWS\system32>compact /compactos:never
Completed uncompressing OS binaries.

0 files within 14484 directories were uncompressed.

C:\WINDOWS\system32>compact /compactos:query
The system is not in the Compact state.  It will remain in this state unless an
administrator changes it.


C:\WINDOWS\system32>

This tends to make me wonder just which version of Windows updates will change the OS properties that are set in the prior version?

In other words, it isn't Windows 10 anymore, just a newly visited Windows.

HoneycombWX · 04 Dec 2018

I wonder if compacting something does something else with the system volume (i.e. deletes the Recovery Partition)?

Compress or Uncompress Windows 10 with Compact OS-2018-12-04.png

NavyLCDR · 04 Dec 2018

HoneycombWX said:

I wonder if compacting something does something else with the system volume (i.e. deletes the Recovery Partition)?

It will not touch the recovery partition.