How Do You Compress A Hard Drive?
If your computer is running slowly, you may need to shrink your hard drive to make more room for other pieces of information your computer needs to work smoothly. Hard drive compression is a simple procedure that takes a few mouse clicks. It should be followed by a disk cleanup and defragmentation, items that are to be done routinely to keep a computer up and running.
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Instructions
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Close all open windows and click on "My Computer" or "Computer." This system folder opens to show all information about the drives on your computer.
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Right-click on the icon of your main hard drive. This is normally the (C:) drive. A drop-down menu will appear.
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Click on "Properties" on the drop-down menu.
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Click on the "General" tab, if that tab isn't already on top. On this screen you should see a pie chart that indicates disk space usage. Beneath the pie chart are two boxes for compressing the contents of the disk and for indexing the drive that may or may not be checked.
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To compress the hard drive, click on the box that says "Compress this drive to save disk space."
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Click on "Apply" and then click on "OK" to compress the hard drive.
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Tips & Warnings
You can normally do a disk cleanup on the same page as a hard drive compression, and then you can click on the "Tools" tab to do a defragmentation. These three procedures together will give your computer a longer life if done routinely and they're not very time-consuming, unless they've never been done and the computer has a lot of miles on it.
