File compression

[Invisible]

Hi folks.

I just had a look round the harddrive of one of our PCs. It's the only Win2K
PC we have (Win2K Pro SP3 btw). Anyhow, I notice that many many files are
listed as being compressed. Perhaps THIS is why the PC is so amazingly slow!
I presume someone out there has used the Disk Cleanup open to "Compress
rarely used files". (This PC came from our other site. The peeps there
aren't too knowledgable about such things...)

Anyway, my question: how do I turn off compression for ALL files on this
drive?

Thanks.

PS. I *presume* simply removing the COMPRESS bit for a file actually results
in it being decompressed... is that correct? If not, how?

 

[Michael Bednarek]

Hi folks.

I just had a look round the harddrive of one of our PCs. It's the only Win2K
PC we have (Win2K Pro SP3 btw). Anyhow, I notice that many many files are
listed as being compressed. Perhaps THIS is why the PC is so amazingly slow!
I presume someone out there has used the Disk Cleanup open to "Compress
rarely used files". (This PC came from our other site. The peeps there
aren't too knowledgable about such things...)

Anyway, my question: how do I turn off compression for ALL files on this
drive?

Thanks.

PS. I *presume* simply removing the COMPRESS bit for a file actually results
in it being decompressed... is that correct? If not, how?

In my experience there is not much of a performance hit unless
processor/memory is grossly inadequate, say 200 MHz/64MB.

The increased processing required for decompressing is compensated by
less data transfer, assuming that the compression ratio is better than
1.7. Ratios >2.5 will probably yield a performance improvement.
Compressing files which just don't lend themselves to it will probably
be worse, but that's just punishment for stupidity.

Mind you, I haven't done any thorough performance analysis, just
observing generally well configured systems where NTFS compression was
employed in a reasonable way. Your mileage may vary.

 

[Invisible]

In my experience there is not much of a performance hit unless

processor/memory is grossly inadequate, say 200 MHz/64MB.

The increased processing required for decompressing is compensated by
less data transfer, assuming that the compression ratio is better than
1.7. Ratios >2.5 will probably yield a performance improvement.
Compressing files which just don't lend themselves to it will probably
be worse, but that's just punishment for stupidity.

Mind you, I haven't done any thorough performance analysis, just
observing generally well configured systems where NTFS compression was
employed in a reasonable way. Your mileage may vary.

This was set up by people who don't really know what they're doing. And the
PC does seem *very* slow - huge amounts of HD thrashing - given that it's
not particularly low-spec. (It's also but fragmented, and I just ran a
defrag anyway - made no difference.) I'm beginning to think maybe I should
just erase the whole dam lot and reinstall from scratch - maybe then the
thing will work properly!

Thanks.