Compressing C:Drive

Question

It seems that I am using up my 80Gig hard drive quickly in my Dell 8250  and I am either looking to add an external hard drive or trying to compress my C: drive. Has anyone tried this compressing of the C drive and does it cause problems with Widows XP? Does it really buy any more memory room? Or should I just go out and buy an external hard drive$$$

mombodog · Answer

Buy an external.   You can compress but this adds to overhead every time those files are accessed for use. You can use disk cleanup to compress old files, it will choose the files to compress for you, and these will be old files with little or no access history.

Rustabout · Answer

That makes sense to buy an external well it looks like $$$ a new external it is. Thanks for the reply.

rickmktg · Answer

Rustabout wrote:

It seems that I am using up my 80Gig hard drive quickly in my Dell 8250 and I am either looking to add an external hard drive or trying to compress my C: drive. Has anyone tried this compressing of the C drive and does it cause problems with Widows XP? Does it really buy any more memory room? Or should I just go out and buy an external hard drive$$$

First, you need to figure out what's filling up your 80gb drive. Have you run Disk Cleanup recently? Do you store lots of videos, music, etc?

Buying a new internal or external drive won't free up space on your 80 unless you make a concerted effort to move the space users, hopefully as easy as moving your music files, or perhaps all of My Documents.

If you do need more hard drive space (it's not "memory"), then the most cost effective way is to add an INTERNAL drive. You can get a 250gb Western Digital at Staples right now for $49.99. I'm picking one up today.

If you want secure backup, then an external drive that you unplug after backup is best - but your issue isn't backup, it's space on the PC.

Windows General

Compressing C:Drive

Was this post helpful?