Compressing drives on Win 7

[Peter Kinross]

Has anyone had any experience with compressing drives in Win 7? My notebook has a SSD and it's nearly full.
Last time I used drive compression was way back when my computer had only one drive of 20 Mb capacity, (yes that's Mb not Gb) years and years ago. Windows then created one huge file with all the compressed files inside. Clearly not a very good idea, and so it proved - I lost the lot.
I assume that Win 7 does it a LOT better, but if someone has any info they could pass along, it would be greatly appreciated.

[JoeP]

You best bet is to do a thorough disk cleaning using either the built-in tool or a third party tool such as Ccleaner. Then, you should pick infrequently used data files and compress them with your favorite zip tool.

Joe

[HansV]

Compression is now transparent, and it works well, but I wouldn't compress the entire disk - it might take a long time and because decompressing files each time you use them may have a negative impact on performance.
I'd select a bunch of folders that you access less frequently and compress those.

And why not get a cheap external hard disk, and transfer some of your files to it?

[Peter Kinross]

After reading stuff online, I am becoming a bit paranoid about using compression on the C: drive.
As an interim measure I have disabled hibernation. I now have 5.9 Gb free in my C: partition. This will give me a bit of leeway time-wise before I have to bite the bullet and upsize the SSD. Bit of a pain though, as I will have to remember to quit all programs when I close the lid when on battery.
I took your advice Hans and compressed one folder - Lenovo's SWTools folder. Now have 6.15 Gb free
Problem with finding which folders to compress is that it appears that with SSDs Explorer doesn't show the folder sizes - at least on my laptop it doesn't. Using SequoiaView (absolutely brilliant free program) doesn't seem to help as it shows files as well.

[StuartR]

...I will have to remember to quit all programs when I close the lid when on battery...

You could use the Control-panel Power applet to change the behaviour of the lid switch.

[Peter Kinross]

Thanks Stuart.
Did that a yesterday.
Unfortunately, to stop hibernation and keep it stopped, you have to ensure that the lid closing is not set to Hibernate, otherwise hibernation is re-started when you close the lid.