How to free up space on your Windows 10 system drive using Compact OS

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Windows 10 has a built-in Compact OS utility that makes the system much smaller.

The volume of modern hard drives has reached such levels that you can forget about saving space forever. However, many users use laptops or tablets equipped with solid state drives. Their size can be small, so every gigabyte counts in this case.

The Windows 10 operating system, depending on the version, occupies 15 to 20 GB of disk space. If the storage capacity is only 64 GB or 128 GB, then there is nothing left for user programs and files. In this case, there is a built-in Compact OS utility, with the help of which the space occupied by the operating system can be slightly reduced.

Compact OS removes everything that is not required for Windows to work, including the system recovery image. Remaining system files and universal applications are compressed using the 4K XPRESS Huffman algorithm. As a result, about 6 GB of additional space may appear on the disk.

If you also want to free up a little extra space, then follow these steps.

Open a Windows terminal with administrator rights and enter the command with which you can check the current state of the disk:

compact / compactos: query

It may be that the system is already compressed. Do not be surprised, Windows is able to independently activate this feature when there is a lack of space.

The second option is "The system is not in a state of compression, but if necessary, it can go into it." In this case, enter the following command:

compact.exe / CompactOS: always

The Compact OS utility will launch and start compressing data. This process may take different time depending on the speed of the drive and the number of system files. At the end, you will see a summary with the number of compressed files and the degree of compression.

Please note that in some cases, compressing the system can result in a loss of performance. This is due to the fact that now, each time the files are accessed, they will be uncompressed on the fly, which may take some time.

You probably won't notice any slowdown, especially if you have enough RAM installed and a solid state drive with good read speed. You should not only turn on system drive encryption (BitLocker function), as this will cause additional load on the processor and disk and will definitely lead to a decrease in the speed of Windows.