Windows 10: Windows Compressing Files

Whenever I download a file windows is automatically compressing it. I can't seem to find any settings to turn this off. I have plenty of room on my hard drive. Anyone know what's going on?

:)

 

So I used KGB Archiver to compress a 10gb file into a 40mb file...

Exactly. Most compression programs change a series of 1s and/or 0s to a couple of digits, and stores the total file in a table of contents/index. If you've got a file with TONS of repeating digits, sure, but pictures? No way to get that kind of compression in the real world.


from an article on "How To Geek"

First, we installed Bastion and compressed its folder — about 863 MB in size of music, graphics, executable files, and various different types of documents:

• Zip (Windows 8.1): 746 MB (86.4% of the original size)
• Zip (WinZip): 745 MB (86.3% of the original size)
• RAR (WinRAR): 746 MB (86.4% of the original size)
• 7z (7-Zip): 734 MB (85% of the original size)

Next, we compressed Hotline Miami, which is 654 MB of data:

• Zip (Windows 8.1): 316 MB (48.3% of the original size)
• Zip (WinZip): 314 MB (48% of the original size)
• RAR (WinRAR): 307 MB (46.9% of the original size)
• 7z (7-Zip): 301 MB (46% of the original size)

I would not expect a great deal of change from those numbers in November of 2014 to now, nor would I expect any real-world files to come any where NEAR the compression rate of .4%.

 

Files in C: drive automatically compressing?

As you may already know, if this feature is on, every new folder/file you add starts off automatically compressed. If you would like to turn it off for the whole drive, kindly follow these steps:

• Start File Explorer . In the left pane, right-click on the drive that you would not want to be compressed.
• Click Properties.
• Make sure that the Compress this drive to save disk space box is unchecked.
• Click OK then Apply.

Let us know if you need further assistance.

 

Compress files??

It all depends on the contents. Back in the early days of DVD games, they had plenty of space compared to CD's. So they left stuff uncompressed on the DVD itself. Compressing such ISO image would result in very high compression ratio. But these days, even DVD discs are becoming small and game companies are already using data compression to fit more data on the same DVD. And since you cannot compress already compressed data, you're seeing more and more of the 99% compresion ratio moments.

Good examples of such scenarios is when you want to compres uncompressed WAV file and a MP3 file. WAV is not compressed and you can decrease its size significantly. You might gain few kilobytes when trying to compress already compressed MP3. The same is with images. You can compress BMP images rather well but when compressing JPG images, you won't really gain anything as its already compressed.

There are few very specialized algorithms that may gain some more compression out of already compressed data, but the gains are usually very small and usually not worth the extra compression time needed to perform the compression itself. Plus you can only use them to compress very specific data files.