Will compressing my hard drive slow the computer down?

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Genralkidd

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Apr 18, 2013
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I have a Samsung Ativ Smart PC 500T and it's running very low on memory and even with micro SD card, it's still difficult to keep some free space on the hard drive. I was thinking about using the built-in disk compression tools. Now even though this tablet supposedly has an SSD drive, it's actually not that fast and the system hangs a lot when the drive is running at 100%. If i compress the entire hard drive to create more space, is that going to cause an overall significant slowdown of my system?
 
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I would never suggest drive compression, except maybe on a secondary drive for storage only. Drives are not that expensive. Either do a major disk cleanup, or get a new drive.
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nukemaster

nukemaster

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Are you running low on drive space or actual memory?

Windows drive compression is not THAT hard on the cpu, but you also do not have THAT fast of a cpu. I would stick without it if you can.

Please note that with only 2gigabytes of memory the system will run out rather easy.

I would try to stop any software from running when its not needed.
 
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Genralkidd

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I believe it's actually an eMMC SSD, meaning it's somewhere along the lines of SD-card flash memory. That would explain why my Windows 8 laptops with regular HDD's boot and load things faster than my tablet. Unfortunately, I don't see any way to even open up this tablet so I doubt the SSD can be replaced, it's probably soldered onto the motherboard anyways.

But yeah, I'm both running out of RAM and SSD memory. I'm pretty sure once my tablet runs out of RAM, it starts using my SSD for page memory thus further stripping my tablet of memory.

If I compress the drive, what kind of performance penalty am I looking at? I used to compress my drives with DriveSpace back when I used Windows 95 and 98. At the time, I didn't notice too much performance penalty, but when I did the a similar thing with Windows XP, my system slowed down significantly to the point of being almost unusable.
 
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nukemaster

nukemaster

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Well XP and Vista/7/8 all use the same NTFS compression. CPUS are much faster, but that is the same basic setup.

It also takes quite some time to try this compression and then to undo it(and I think you need a certain amount of free space).

How big is your micro SD card? can you move ALL your files(documents/desktop/pictures/ect) to it to see if that helps? Also maybe running msconfig and getting rid of any non needed programs that run with the system on startup to try to reduce memory load.

2gigabytes of memory is a bit low by today's standards(Just my web browser takes over 400 with only 5 tabs[simple ones] open).
 
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Genralkidd

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I have a 64 GB microSDXC card and I've already moved all I can to the card including some programs as well. I'm not positive but it seems what's taking up the most space is the Windows 8 apps. I don't seem to be able to change where they install to. I don't mind if it takes time to compress my SSD. I'm just more concerned about the system performance after the compression is complete since it takes more CPU cycles and SSD Read/Write cycles to access the compressed information.
 
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Darkshadow2913

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I would suggest you give the thing a disk cleanup and then do a ccleaner cleanup...

It is soldered onto the board, and you are correct once you run out of ram it starts using whats called a page file...

What you can do is start to disable some less used services on windows...
 
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