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Windows Disk Compression blew my mind...

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by jaymzkerten 1 view

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Alright maybe someone here can help me figure out what exactly happened here:

I'm running Windows XP on my macbook using Bootcamp. I had just installed XP on the laptop, and was trying to install SP3 on it. When it got to the point where it was trying to create a restore point folder, it said I did not have enough disk space for it to continue (I had 4.08GB used on a 20.5GB partition).

I was poking around on it and decided I'd try to run the Windows Disk Compression and see if that'd make it happy. Before I ran the utility, I was using 4.08GB on the partition. After the compression -- 5.00GB. This part blew my mind. So since it decided that compressing it made it bigger, I decided to decompress it. This brought it to 4.81GB, and 4.86GB after a reboot. I set it to show all hidden folders/files and show protected system files, highlighted everything in C:\, and checked the size of everything -- 4.16GB

What's with the discrepancy here? This has me all kinds of confused.

3 replies

by slayer_

Sounds like the file system ate up your space.

by seanferd

Plus, if you have a lot of files that cannot be compressed, there isn't much compression overall, but probably additional overhead.

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