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Hey guys, i recently tried to improve performance in my laptop by compressing files on the c: drive... however due to my own negligence i compressed the entire c: drive and not just the my documents folder! Stupidity on my own part! Since doing this i have noticed a huge performance decrease from my machine. Would i be better backing up documents and reformatting the entire system or is there a better alternative to boost my performance again? I have tried uncompressing the c drive again but it wont uncompress all the files, meaning performance wont even go back to previous level! Any help would be appreciated!

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4 Answers 4

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Not sure if this is the answer but it may help.

Found on http://www.softwaretipsandtricks.com/forum/windows-xp/8270-how-uncompress-compressed-files-ntfs-drive.html

There's no need to "un-compress" them. They will "un-compress" as you use them. Every time you open a file or folder it will "un-compress". It will not "re-compress" when you close it unless you do it intentionally.

If this is the case then it will just take some time to fix it self.

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  • thanks very much! i ahve noticed performance slowly coming back but not at a great rate! puts me at ease to know i havent done too much and i can get better performance back again!
    – craig
    Jan 27, 2010 at 14:57
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When you write "but it wont uncompress all the files", what messages do you see? Does it uncompress some but complain about others? Does it fail to uncompress any files at all? Or does it silently fail?

You could try uncompressing smaller regions of the drive: maybe try things in C:\Windows first, or Documents and Settings, or even individual user's folders.

It hasn't done something really weird like try to compress the paging file (pagefile.sys) or the registry hives, has it? 'Coz that really would slow things down.

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  • I agree, start decompressing the system files first. If some system files won't decompress, try in safe mode. Then after decompressing to defrag. Jan 28, 2010 at 5:14
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Try defragmenting the drive.

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This isn't programming related at all, so this will be closed soon, no doubt.

Still: Compressing will never make anything faster. Now your computer has to go to the trouble of compressing and decompressing every single thing that goes in and out of your drive. Which is a lot.

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    It's not so clear-cut. Transmitting less data is faster (it doesn't improve the latency but saves data/bandwidth time). And some compression and decompression algorithms, such as LZO, are extremely fast. Jan 27, 2010 at 13:26

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