Hi All, Does anyone know if compression has been implemented yet in any of the Win10 builds? How would you install the OS? Will it be an option during installation? Compression may have been good with smaller SSD's (that's what wimboot was for) but do we really need it now? I've used "Double Space", "DriveSpace" & Stacker to know I'd rather be without! Any thoughts?
It had been implemented, you need to run disk cleanup wizard and it's an option through there. This compression is NOT the same as NTFS file compression. It's supposedly better compression and faster than that. If you enable NTFS for compression it disables this compression. I think it should be mandatory, at least on Windows Apps, the driver store folder as well as a couple of other inefficient or large rarely used repositories.
If you are using DISM you can use the /compact switch, I'm not sure when it was implemented but it works on 10041 and 10049. I haven't figured out how to get the recovery enhancements, reagentc doesn't seem to let me specify anything other than the location of a WIM file for the OS image.
I've compressed following native files in my Windows 8.1 WIM: *.exe *.dll *.msi (can be skipped) *.cab (can be skipped) *.bmp *.wav *.ocx *.pak *.sys *.inf *.pnf *.xml *.chm *.mui *.db And there is no bad impact because most of these files are just "read only" files and do not need to be modified. You could try to compact "WinSxS" too, but I've not tested. No impact on a SSD and FX-6300 CPU. And if the Windows 10 compression is better than the NTFS compression, just forget it.
You can safely compress everything (well except the bootmgr) the NTFS compression is smart enough to not waste time trying to recompress the already compressed files. You will see them in blue but they are practically untouched. And on SSDs, generally you don't lose performance, likely you will get a gain.
Although, NTFS compression might got improved under Win10, I think it is the same. I accidentally compressed my system files with the disk cleanup utility and I could completely reverse it (proof: the Disk Utility yet again offered me the compression like it never happened) by decompressing every files like they were compressed by the age old NTFS compression (I used the old command I can't recall from memory but Google was my friend). That's not true. You can manually compress the files on an HDD. The problem is that HDDs work very slow with fragmented filesystems and compression often causes fragmentation. It doesn't matter that much on SSDs (sequential throughput in MBPS is also higher but random IOPS is A LOT higher).
This is a little off topic, but how would upgrading Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 on a compressed OS go? My Asus has 32Gb of eMMC space and runs a compressed OS. When I tried upgrading to Win 10, it gave me the error that it could not install on a compressed OS. When Windows 10 RTM comes out, how would the upgrade go? EDIT: It does touch on the topic but this article was written about a month ago, does anyone have more news about it? Code: [h=2]We're working on bringing upgrade to low capacity devices[/h][FONT=WOL_Reg]The reason Windows 8.1 devices using WIMBOOT are not yet able to upgrade to Windows 10 is because many of the WIMBOOT devices have very limited system storage. That presents a challenge when we need to have the Windows 8.1 OS, the downloaded install image, and the Windows 10 OS available during the upgrade process. We do this because we need to be able to restore the machine back to Windows 8.1 if anything unexpected happens during the upgrade, such as power loss. In sum, WIMBOOT devices present a capacity challenge to the upgrade process and we are evaluating a couple of options for a safe and reliable upgrade path for those devices. [/FONT]
Is there any reason not to use the LZX compression? Will it make the file load slower when compacted in this format?