disk clean-up - "old files" question

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gregf

On one of my PCs when I run the disk cleanup utility, it has Compress
Old Files in the list of what it finds. It find someting like 266,000k
of "old" files, which got me to wonder, in this case what does WXP
consider old files? I've searched the machine and cleaned it up,
deleting what I think are old or unused files, including searching for
the .old extension, but still it finds these. I can serach just for the
date created/used/accessed, but what date should I be looking for?
 
On one of my PCs when I run the disk cleanup utility, it has
Compress Old Files in the list of what it finds. It find
someting like 266,000k of "old" files, which got me to
wonder, in this case what does WXP consider old files? I've
searched the machine and cleaned it up, deleting what I
think are old or unused files, including searching for the
.old extension, but still it finds these. I can serach just
for the date created/used/accessed, but what date should I
be looking for?
Click to expand...

Keep in mind that the "Compress Old Files" option does not
delete files. It finds files that have not been accessed
recently and offers to compress them to save space. This option
is available only on an NTFS formatted drive. As far as what XP
considers "old", run Disk Cleanup and click on "Compress Old
Files" so the entry is highlighted. Read the text in the
Description box. Next, click on the Options button. In the box
that pops up, you can select a time frame for classifying files
as "old".

Good luck

Nepatsfan
 
Does that include system files? I'm just wondering why I have so many
on here and if I can delete them.
This is starting to jog my memory about something that might be
related...when the files become compressed, don't they show up as a
different color in file explorer?
 
Does that include system files? I'm just wondering why I
have so many on here and if I can delete them.
This is starting to jog my memory about something that might
be related...when the files become compressed, don't they
show up as a different color in file explorer?
Click to expand...

The names of compressed files and folders will, by default, be
displayed in blue.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish? Searching trough
your hard drive and deleting files and folders just because
they haven't been accessed recently or they're compressed may
lead to problems.

Nepatsfan
 
I'm just wondering about saving space, it's something like 649,000k
worth of files (my original number was wrong, I was going off of
memory). None of my other PCs have that many old files. This PC is very
slow as well, so it's just one of the things I'm checking into.
 
You're misinterpreting the information you're getting. First
off, the amount you saw in Disk Cleanup next to "Compress Old
Files" , the 649,000 KB, represents how much hard drive space
will be saved by compressing the files. If you run Disk Cleanup
again immediately after the files were compressed, Windows will
report 0 KB.

Let's see if the following hypothetical example helps you gain
a better understanding of the concept involved:
1. You run Disk Cleanup on your system.
2. Windows searches through the drive and identifies all the
files that it classifies as "old".
Those "old" files currently occupy 1,649,000 KB of hard drive
space.
3. Windows does the math and calculates that if it compresses
these files they'll fit into 1,000,000 KB, freeing up 649,000
KB of disk space.
4. Windows reports 649,000 for "Compress Old Files". This
represents the "savings" you'll see by compressing old files.
If you were to look at the Properties for this drive before and
after compressing the files, there would be 649,000 KB more
free space after the procedure.
5. You let Windows compress these files so you can gain the
649,000 KB in free space.
6. Right after the process is complete, you run Disk Cleanup
again.
7. Windows shows 0 KB next to "Compress Old Files". Since all
"old" files have been compressed, there's no more space
available to be made using this option.

Here's the bottom line:
The files are still on your computer.
They haven't been deleted, they're simply taking up less space
on your hard drive than they did before you ran Disk Cleanup.

Nepatsfan
 
I see, that makes sense, except the 0kb is from looking at the files in
file explorer, not in disk cleanup again. I take it they must be less
than1kb files and after compressing they show up then as 0kb?
 
They were 0 KB before they were compressed. For them to have
gone from 1 KB to 0 KB would mean that the data the file
originally contained was deleted. That's not the way it works.

I have no idea why Windows would compress an empty file. That's
a question you're going to have to ask someone who knows a
whole lot more about the inner workings of Windows than I do.
If you're really curious, open up a command prompt window and
use the cd command to go to a folder that contains some of the
0 KB compressed files. Run the compact command. You should find
that those 0 KB files have a 1 to 1 compression ratio. That
means that there was no space saved by compressing the file.

Nepatsfan
 
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