Maybe some of you still remember the DriveSpace and DoubleSpace disk compression utilities that came out with Windows 95 and 98. They could be a real pain to work with, slowing down your hard-drive access, and sometimes leading to file corruption. Well with newer operating systems, such as Windows 2000 and XP, which support a new type of hard-drive formatting called NTFS (Windows NT File System), these problems are a thing of the past.

If you are running Windows XP, most likely your drive is formatted with NTFS. To check, open up My Computer or Explorer, right-click on your drive, and choose Properties. On the General tab, second text line down is the File System description.

NT File System is greatly superior to the old FAT (File Allocation Table) system, for many reasons. One is that it keeps track of changes made to the file system with logs and checkpoints, so that if there is a crash, it can easily rebuild the file system if required. Another reason, which won't affect most home users, is that it supports setting of file permissions, so that only certain users can access certain files. File access is also faster in large folders. And finally, it supports compression of not just disks as a whole, but individual files and folders.

What this means is that you can compress, for example, just your pictures folder, or just your Internet cache folder. Or if you have a particularly large document you are working on, such as a publishing project, a large image, or a book, then you can compress that item to save space. There is no negligible slowdown on loading and working with compressed items.

To access the compression feature, open Windows Explorer and navigate to the file or folder you wish to compress. Right-click on it and choose Properties. On the General tab click the Advanced button. In the Advanced Attributes dialog, you will see an option "Compress contents to save disk space." Make sure it is checked on, then click Ok, and Ok again to exit the Properties dialog. The files will then be compressed, and you can go on working as normal.

Compressing the Program Files directory

There is another option you may want to turn on so that you can more easily see which items are compressed. With Windows Explorer open, select the Tools menu and pick Folder Options. Select the View tab, then scroll to the bottom of the list box and make sure the option "Show encrypted or compressed NTFS files in color" is turned on. Click Ok.

Turning on colors for compressed files

The compressed items will show up with their title text in blue instead of black (look at the first screenshot up above again to see an example). You're done!

For those more technical minded people who would like to read a complete description of the differences between FAT and NTFS file systems, click here...