# Compressing Hard Drive C - is it safe?



## devida

I bought my Thinkpad used 4 years ago. It came with two hard drives: C has 2GB, and D has about 10GB. I'm happy with it, but it's starting to give me some trouble because I'm running out of room on C. 
I've installed most of my program files on D, and try to leave C as free as possible. But even so, now there's not much room left on C drive (I just installed a wireless network adapter, and it defaulted to C  
Anyway ... just wondering how safe it is to run the Windows compression on my C drive. It's down to about 89MB .... yikes. I need some more room.

Thanks ...


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## bassetman

Welcome to TSG! 

Most people don't recommend compressing a drive! I have heard once compressed it cannot be "uncompressed" and makes it slower! 

Others may have opinions too!


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## pseye

drive compression or doublespacing slows drive down like molasses. read article here.
http://www.help2go.com/article25.html


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## Alex Ethridge

bassetman is right. Compressing a drive of that size will gain you almost nothing in space. It will also introduce other anomalies like a slowed system and spurious, unexpected program errors.

Drive compression never worked very well and, in my opinion, should have been removed from Windows long before '98 was released.

You can get a 40-Gig laptop drive from NewEgg for under $70


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## sammysosa

Compressing your C: drive is a one-way ticket to reinstallation madness, please don't do it. You CAN use a ZIP utility (such as 7-Zip) to compress individual folders on your system, as long as you're sure you don't need them.

If nothing else, you should be able to drag and drop all of your .JPG files, .TXT and .DOC files, and any other standalone files (not part of something else) to a folder on the D: drive.

Here are a few more suggestions to make some room on the C: drive:

Open Windows Explorer, then click on the Program Files folder in the left window-pane. Find the "Online Services" folder in the right window-pane, highlight it, then delete is. It is only taking up space with advertising you don't need; depending on which version of Windows you're using, you can reclaim more than 10 MB of space just by deleting that single folder.

Next, scroll down and open the Windows folder, then open the Favorites folder. Delete everything except the Links folder, which is where your personal bookmarks ("Favorites") are stored. The rest of them are just advertising, so scrape them off the C: drive.

Now, scroll down to the System folder (still inside the Windows folder). Find the "OOBE" folder in the right window-pane, highlight it, then delete it. The "Out of Box Experience" folder is just more advertising trash you don't need, and you'll save about 3.5 MB of space by deleting it.

After that, you can open My Computer, right-click the C: drive, and choose the Properties option. When you see the General tab (and the piechart), click the Disk Cleanup button, and let Windows try to find more junk you can remove.

Next, download Crap Cleaner from here:

http://www.ccleaner.com

Save it to a folder on the D: drive, (or your Desktop, if that will make finding it easier), and run it. Allow it to analyze your system; it will show you files you should be able to safely delete. It even deletes the INDEX.DAT files when you reboot the system, and that will free some space for you. CCleaner is small (about 500KB), so don't worry if you don't know how to save it to the D: drive. You can always move it with Windows Explorer once you download it to the C: drive.

CCleaner won't actually DO anything until you click on the "Run Cleaner" button. If you don't want to delete anything it finds, just click on the "EXIT" button, and nothing will happen at all.

Let us know how this turns out; I'm also curious to kind out how much more space you recover after deleting those junk files...


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## devida

Thanks to all who replied. wow ... I'm so glad I asked otherwise I coulda got into some trouble .... :-(

I appreciate the suggestions and I'll try 'em when I get a chance. ...and of course let you know how it all works afterwards.

What a great forum!


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## bassetman

devida said:


> Thanks to all who replied. wow ... I'm so glad I asked otherwise I coulda got into some trouble .... :-(
> 
> I appreciate the suggestions and I'll try 'em when I get a chance. ...and of course let you know how it all works afterwards.
> 
> What a great forum!


 :up: Glad you like the place, we sure do!


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## Old Lady

I too was considering compressing my drive for more space. TG I didn't do it. I did follow the directions that sammysosa had suggested. From doing that I was able to free up nearly 1/3 of my C drive.....it's only 2G. Thank you for giving your time to help those of us who are clueless to these things.


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