I thought you weren't supposed to compress files in the window directory...

Because I tried this once a few years ago in the past and just recently I got this email.... Maybe I did it wrong?





The Ultimate Tutorial For Optimizing Your Hard Drive For 800% Better Raw Performance.... You can try all sorts of tweaks and tricks to improve your Windows performance - registry cleaners, memory defraggers, vanilla hard drive defrag, editing your system configuration to prevent services and programs from loading, and so on… BUT some of these utilities and tweaks are dangerous potentially leaving your Windows Operating System unstable. More importantly….. you’re wasting your precious time. Performance gains from all these tweaks are negligible! If they work, the sum total of the performance increase might, if you’re lucky, be “milliseconds” per day.
None of them address the main performance bottleneck of your Windows PC and that is your hard drive and the time taken to read files from it.
Out of the factory – the average hard drive performs as follows:
Average Data Transfer – around 50 M/b per second
Average Seek Time – 13 milliseconds
Average Access time – 18 milliseconds
Through what we are going to do via this tutorial – we are going to significantly improve these figures to around:
Average Data Access – around 120 M/b per second
Average Seek Time – 1 to 2 milliseconds
Average Access time – 6.5 milliseconds
We’re going to give you around 800 % raw hard drive performance increase and the performance you’ll gain when you are using your Windows PC will be CLEARLY apparent. You’ll actually be quite stunned by the performance increase as you’ll see programs literally “snap” open when you launch them and you’ll see overall latency reduce as you remove the “drag” from your system.
Firstly we are going to improve your average file read speed by 50% by taking advantage of NTFS file compression (built into Windows & NTFS) that will reduce the amount of time your drive takes to read files by an average of 50%.
Secondly we are going to improve your average data transfer rates by 50% by moving files from most frequently accessed files on your hard drive to the outer tracks of your hard drive where data transfer rates are as much as doubled.
Thirdly we are going to improve your average file access times by around 250% by getting all of the file clutter out of the way and positioning your most frequently accessed files within “track-to-track” seek physical distance on your hard drive.
Fourthly we are going to optimize placement of our system files and metafiles such as MFT and page file. For another average of 25% improvement.
Your overall hard drive performance will be improved by around: 1.5 x 1.5 x 2.8 X 1.25 = 787%
Let’s get to it!
Compressing Key Files & Directories
NTFS file compression is built in file compression that is part of the NTFS file system. The file remains in its native readable format (as opposed to zip compression) but occupies a smaller space on the drive. Therefore less physical data is accessed from the drive. It is decompressed on the fly. Since today’s processors are so powerful – the decompression time is negligible so the time saved reading the file is directly proportional to the compression factor. Some files compress 50 to 1, some 10 to one and some, such as jpg files, are not compressible. The average file compression factor you’ll experience is around 1.6 to 1.
We’re going to compress all files in these 3 main directories:
In Windows XP:

• Documents and Settings
• Program Files
• Windows
• All .exe and .dll files across the entire drive

In Windows Vista And Windows 7 - 32 bit

• Users
• Program Files
• Program Data
• Windows
• All .exe and .dll files across the entire drive

In Windows Vista and Windows 7 - 64 bit

• Users
• Program Files
• Program Files (x86)
• Program Data
• Windows
• All .exe and .dll files across the entire drive

We’re going to perform the compression through a simple command prompt command. Since some files will be locked by the operating system we are going to perform the compression in 2 steps – one in a normal Windows session and a second time in safe mode to compress some of the files that are not compressible in a normal Windows session.
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• Bring up the command prompt: Start => Accessories => Command Prompt. You’ll have a small black screen as per the MS-DOS days
  
• In Vista and 7 - Change Directory to Users with the command CD \Users
  In XP Change Directory to Documents and Settings with the command CD \Documents and Settings
  
• Enter the compression command as follows: compact /c /s /i. Your system will go through and compress all the files in this directory and subdirectories. It could take 10 to 20 minutes depending on the amount of data.
  
• When complete do the same with Program Files. Issue the command CD \Program Files (for 64 bit systems do the same with Program Files (x86).
  

• Enter the compression command as follows: compact /c /s /i. Your system will go through and compress all the files in this directory and subdirectories. It could take 10 to 20 minutes depending on the amount of data.
  
• When complete do the same with Windows Files. Issue the command CD \Windows
  

• Enter the compression command as follows: compact /c /s /i. Your system will go through and compress all the files in this directory and subdirectories. It could take or so 20 minutes
  

• When complete we are going to compress all other .exe and .dll files across the whole drive. Issue the command CD\. You should only have C:\> prompt showing.
  

• Enter the compression command as follows compact /c /s /i *.exe. This will compress all other .exe files across your drive. When complete issue the command compact /c /s /i *.dll. This will compress all .dll files across the entire drive.
  

• When you complete steps 1 through 9, restart your system into safe mode. To do this, restart your system and as it is starting tap the F8 key a few times. When the safe mode dialogue comes up select the top option Safe Mode and your system will boot into safe mode.
  

• Repeat steps 1 to 9. This will compress some of the files that were locked in normal mode.
  

• When you have completed steps 1 to 9, restart your system normally.

What you have just done is applied NTFS compression to all Program Files, User files and Windows files. These now occupy about 2/3 the space on your hard drive they normally did. Your hard drive will spend 1/3 less time reading these files when and as your computer accesses them because there is 1/3 less data to read from the hard drive. You won’t see much of a performance increase at this stage since many of the files will be fragmented. In a moment we’ll move onto the defragmentation, optimal file placement and confinement of those files to the outer tracks of your hard drive where transfer performance for those files will be increased by an average of 50%.
Defragmenting, Optimally Placing Files and Seek Confinement
These steps are where we are going to vastly improve the performance. You will need UltimateDefrag to do this.
We are going to:

• Move rarely used files out of the way to the inner areas of your hard drive using the archive function. Since these files are rarely used we don’t want them in the fastest performing areas of your hard drive which we want to dedicate to Windows, Program Files and User Files.
  
• Defrag and Move all the compressed files to the outer tracks of your hard drive. These will end up in a narrow band at the outer rings of your hard drive in your UltimateDefrag disk display. Known as seek confinement.

Follow these steps to achieve this:

• Launch UltimateDefrag
  

• Select Settings
  

• Under the Archive section we are going to select Automatic – 91 Past days data was not used and we are going to all wildcard *.zip. This is going to move all files you haven’t used in the past 90 days to the inner tracks and also all zip files.
  

• Under High Performance we are going to select Custom (Select Files) and we are going to add:
  
  In Windows XP: Program Files, Documents And Settings and Windows
  
  In Vista and Win 7: Program Files, Program Files (x86) (in 64 bit versions), Program Data, Users and Windows
  

• Note when you check these directories you also need to click them across to the left panel then select OK.
  

• Back at the Settings screen you will also add files by wildcard: *.exe, *.dll, *.sys
  

• Select Very Fast Placement. FragProtect is optional.
  

• When you have completed these settings, select OK to go back to the UltimateDefrag main user interface.

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Running the defrag and file placement routine.

• Under Defragmentation Mode select the CONSOLIDATE method
  

• Select the Options button right next to the Consolidate method.
  

• Place a check mark next to:
  Respect High Performance
  Respect Archive
  Place Directories Next to MFT
  Very Fast Placement
  FragProtect is optional.
  
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• When you have selected these settings, press OK to go back to the main UltimateDefrag screen.
  

• We are ready to run the process. Press Start.
  

• UltimateDefrag will now go ahead and perform the defragmentation and file placement. Depending upon the amount of data on your drive and current file placement this routing can take anywhere between 20 minutes to 5 hours.

When complete your drive is going to look something like this:
Optimizing Placement Of System Files
We’re going to complete the final step of placing important system files such as MFT, Page File, USN Change Journal and Logfile in close proximity to your high performance files. You hard drive is constantly writing to and reading from these system files and we want to minimize travel time for your hard drive heads to and from these system files.
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• The first thing we are going to do is take note of the cluster we want these system files to begin at.
  
• Click your mouse in the first square in the third ring from the outer tracks.
  
• The cluster viewer will appear in the left hand pane
  
• Take note of the first number after cluster viewer. In this example it is 6056610. This will be the Starting Cluster you will use in the boot time screen.
  
• Go into Settings and select Boot Time
  
• Keep all default settings but in the Starting Cluster enter the number you got from step 4 above.
  
• Check Run During Next Boot and select OK.
  
• Exit UltimateDefrag and restart your system.
  
• When your system restarts the boot time module will defrag and optimally place your system files.
  
• After your system starts you may want to (and should) run Defragmenting, Optimally Placing Files and Seek Confinement steps above to finalize placement of your files after movement of your system files.

Your final disk display when you have completed this routine will look something like the image below and your average hard drive performance increase for your system is around 800%! You WILL clearly see and feel this performance increase.
Here Is The Result - Average Hard Drive File Access Performance Increase Around 800%:
Click Image To Enlarge
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Only one software product in the world, will give you complete control over defragmentation and optimal placement of your files, programs and applications and that product is UltimateDefrag 3.
Don’t Settle For Less Than Optimal PC Performance
Sure, you can use the default FREE Windows defragger but with FREE you get what you pay for. It defrags but nothing is done to optimize hard drive performance and it certainly can’t defrag and specifically optimize specific programs and applications.
Sure, you can use another defragger from the 30 or so that are out there on the market. Some are free, some cost $10 and some cost $100. But all you’re getting with any of them are just “defraggers”. None of them enable to you defrag and specifically optimize specific programs and applications. Only UltimateDefrag 3 can do that.

 

so any word on if doing it this way is safe or not?

 

Well logic to me says if i compress a file then want to read it, it has then to be decompressed taking more cpu cycles and time. Idk seems fishy to me.

 

yeah but according to them, with today's processors, that shouldn't be an issue.

 

Well, there's a very simple way to test this - just take an image of your system and try it. If it works then fine, and if it doesn't then restore the image.

My 2p worth - it's just hype.

 

^^ What he said!

 

I have never tryed this, but it is listed as a performance tweak for NTFS.

Here is another 'how to':
Tech Tip: Disable the last access update

Also listed in that first article is PageDefrag v2.32

I have PageDefrag set to run on every boot with a zero second delay and it is very fast.

These are better methods of improving disk performance.

And of course a good defragmenter such as:
MyDefrag
Puran Defrag Free Edition

That's my 2¢

 

Hmm..