Compressed, blue files -?

[Guest]

Beginning just after a recent WinXP update, my wife's Gateway laptop has
changed the color of many saved files, notably Word documents. They used to
be black, now they are blue. An MVP on the Word group said that they have
been compressed by Windows and should not give trouble. That may well be,
but none of the other 3 WinXP computers in the house are doing this and it
makes me nervous. Is there a way to turn this feature off? Thanks, -Jim

 

[Shenan Stanley]

Beginning just after a recent WinXP update, my wife's Gateway laptop
has changed the color of many saved files, notably Word documents.
They used to be black, now they are blue. An MVP on the Word group
said that they have been compressed by Windows and should not give
trouble. That may well be, but none of the other 3 WinXP computers
in the house are doing this and it makes me nervous. Is there a way
to turn this feature off? Thanks, -Jim

Read up on it:
How To Use File Compression in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307987

It is not hurting anything and those files are being compressed because they
are old and unused in most cases. When you copy them to another drive, they
are automatically decompressed. My suggestion is to use it as a marker for
files you really should just brurn to CD - as you probably do not use those
particular word documents that much. If you do - then you may be running
out of space and have other issues that would encourage you to burn the
files to CD.

 

[Bruce Chambers]

Beginning just after a recent WinXP update, my wife's Gateway laptop has
changed the color of many saved files, notably Word documents. They used to
be black, now they are blue. An MVP on the Word group said that they have
been compressed by Windows and should not give trouble. That may well be,
but none of the other 3 WinXP computers in the house are doing this and it
makes me nervous. Is there a way to turn this feature off? Thanks, -Jim

By design, WinXP automatically compresses files that do not get
used frequently, and, if you've left the default settings intact,
displays those files in blue.

If you wish to change this behavior, in Windows Explorer, click
Tools > Folder Options > View > Advanced settings: Show encrypted or
compressed NTFS files in color.


--

Bruce Chambers

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[Guest]

Thanks to you both! I understand now.

 

[Jeffrey Randow (MVP)]

Compression on XP/2K machines is fairly safe. Much safer than the
days of compression using DoubleDisk/Stacker in DOS/Win9x...