Compressing your OS files: good idea?

[janas19]

I've built about 3 machines running Windows XP in the last few months. I use the nLite utility to remove some bloat from the Windows XP distribution (ie, Windows tour, some multimedia files, printer drivers, other stuff). When I'm done, Windows XP Home takes about 2GB of space.

Is it a good idea to compress the core files using Disk Cleanup, since in my usage I usually don't tweak these files and won't be moving them much? Or will compressing affect system tasks?

 

[janas19]

Update: I just compressed the C:\Windows folder and all subfolders and files. It didn't appear to save any space at all.

Microsoft's support page says files compressed under NTFS are decompressed on the fly, so hopefully it won't affect performance.

 

[Makaveli]

I remember reading about this before and there is suppose to be a small performance penalty but nothing you will feel and would need a benchmark to see.

 

[acefightr]

Good info. Thanks.

 

[janas19]

I remember reading about this before and there is suppose to be a small performance penalty but nothing you will feel and would need a benchmark to see.

Hm that makes sense. A small penalty in benchmarks but practically unnoticeable in real-world apps?

Thank you.

 

[jimhsu]

There could actually be a small performance improvement, if your drive is slow and you are doing largely sequential reads. Yes, it's possible.

 

[magreen]

There could actually be a small performance improvement, if your drive is slow and you are doing largely sequential reads. Yes, it's possible.

I suppose that depends on processor speed versus access times. And the likelihood of the processor being idle at that time.

Of course that might drive power consumption up, assuming the cpu wattage under load versus idle is more than the hdd wattage spinning versus idle (probably a safe assumption).

Of course these effects are proabably negligible!

 

[Ketchup]

I reversed a 'compress old files' once and saw an huge speed increase, so I have done it several times. But those were on older computers running XP, so it would probably affect a smaller change on a newer system.

But I have a hard time believing it would actually be faster. OS files and quite small, so sequential read change would be negligible. The time it would take the CPU to uncompress each one as needed would not.

 

[janas19]

I reversed a 'compress old files' once and saw an huge speed increase, so I have done it several times. But those were on older computers running XP, so it would probably affect a smaller change on a newer system.

But I have a hard time believing it would actually be faster. OS files and quite small, so sequential read change would be negligible. The time it would take the CPU to uncompress each one as needed would not.

True. The size of the files is pretty small. Good point :thumbup: