1. Go to Windows Explorer and from there, go to the left pane of the window and look for This PC. Click on it once, wait for the page to load.
2. Once This PC is loaded you should see your disks and partitions
3. Choose the partition/disk you would like to compress by marking it once by left clicking on it.
5. In the newly opened side menu, look for Properties and click on it once. Wait for the Properties window to load.
6. The properties window should be loaded with the General tab chosen. If it’s not chosen, please choose it by clicking on it once.
7. In the General tab, in the bottom part, look for the Compress the drive to save disk space sentence. Tag that option by clicking once on tagging box left to it. Once tagged, you should see a blue B sign in that box
8. Click on the Apply button to apply the change
9. Once clicked, a pop-up window titled Confirm Attribute Changes will appear.
10. In that confirmation window there should be 2 options:
a. Apply changes to drive C:\ only
b. Apply changes to drive C:\, subfolders and files
- In this article we will choose the latter option (b) since this option saves the most space by default.
12. Once this option is chosen, click the OK button.
13. In most cases, Windows Security feature will prompt you to allow access to this action. As you can see here, in this case of this article, it does indeed ask for permission to do so.
15. In most cases, Windows will prompt you for an error compressing the selected attributes by popping up a warning window titled Error Applying Attributes. In that case, click on the Ignore All button.
16. After clicking the Ignore All button, Windows will start compressing the disk/partition based on the attribute selected. This process will be represented by a window titled “Applying attributes…” with an process indicator bar. Note that you can continue working on your computer while the compression process is being done. Take into account that the more intensive your work would be the more time it would take for the compression process to finish.
17. By most accounts, this process takes a lot of time, even on fast NVMEs. This length of this process also depends on the number of files and folders present on the selected disk/partition. The more files and folders – the more time it would take to compress them.
18. It is recommended to perform this process as early as possible after installing Windows so it takes less time.
19. Another very important note – compressing the disk/partition slows down read/write times of the disk. You must take that into account before performing this action and do the ROIs. If saving space is more important than performance – do it. If the degradation of performance is negligible considering your work – do it.
20. Once the process is done, the compressing indicator process window will disappear and you should notice a change in your free space for the better.
21. Note that before we started the compression process, free space was 85GB, now it’s 86.1GB. it might not seem much but if there were significantly more files on that disk, the space saving would have been much more apparant