Blue means they are compressed, are you running low on disk space? You can right click on the file and select uncompress if needed.

 

http://www.winxptutor.com/filecolor.htm

Bessie, You can also go to My computer>right click C> choose properties> and uncheck compress drive to save space.(Unless you are low on space)

"Compress drive to save disk space" is not checked on my computer nor has it ever been checked.  I have nearly 80% of my disk space free.   Since it is something as simple as that I won't worry but I do appreciate the input from both of you.

 

Bessie

Hello Bessie!

 

By chance have you recently done a "disk cleanup?"  If you right click on your HD icon and select properties and under the "General" tab there is a button "Disk Cleanup."  If you have done this you will notice that it gives you a number of options to help clean up your hard drive.  One of these options is to compress old files.  If you have done this then the disk cleaning utility will compress certain files that have not been accessed in a number of days.  On my system it is set up to compress files that have not been accessed in the last fifty (50) days.

 

Hope this helps!

 

Thomas,

 

Thanks.  I do disk cleanup farely often but never choose to compress files.  All of this is more of a curiousity than anything else.  I bought a new digital camera early this year.  I still have the pictures I took with my old digital camera on my hard drive and ALL of these picture files are now in blue; the new camera pictures haven't gone to blue yet.  Since my System Restore doesn't work any more (no need to try to help that one!  Been through it all) I use NT Backup to backup my system state.  Large files are created with this and the older ones are now shown in blue.  Oldest was in late April.  Guess I can get rid of some of them now.

 

Thanks for your interest.

 

Bessie