Although the space problem It is not usually common today among users, given the great capacities that current hard drives present, it is possible that you are interested in carrying out the following tutorial that we present to you to take advantage of those gigabytes that your unit offers you a little more.
Windows 10 We have seen that it performs differently than it did in past versions. Without getting to differentiate if it is better or worse, we can say that storage management is different due to the installation of the operating system and the functionalities it incorporates. With these simple steps we will teach you how to free up to 20 GB of your drive quickly and easily.
With this guide you will see SSD drive users especially benefited, since in these disks there are not yet especially large storage capacities, or tablet users, where internal storage is also scarce.
What is CompactOS?
To carry it out we will use Compact OS, a replacement for WIMBoot that was used in Windows 8.1 and that saved hard disk space by taking advantage of the recovery partition. This partition, present on many computers as the first part of the disk and hidden so that it cannot be affected by external actions, allows you to completely reinstall the operating system or any of its parts in a matter of minutes.
With WIMBoot It was possible to take advantage of those 4GB that the recovery partition occupied and make the C: drive larger, which is the one that Windows uses by default. However, this function was used by manufacturers to include programs bloatware within your own images, software that overloads the operating system and that in many cases involves software that does not provide any functionality to the user.
With the arrival of Windows 10, the recovery partition was lost and CompactOS arrived as a solution to save space within the system. Thanks to this functionality it is possible to compress the operating system files into a single file, which you can later unzip Windows 10 when you need to recover something inside.
While WIMBoot did not really save space within the system, since it was dedicated to moving information between partitions, with CompactOS you can actually free up several gigabytes of your computer, albeit at the cost of some loss of equipment performance. This will depend above all on the capabilities of the device.
How to recover the space?
CompactOS is a functionality that can be activated and deactivated at our choice. We will find out if it is in use using the following command, always with administrator privileges: Compact / CompactOS: query
If it is not, we can activate it with the following command: Compact / CompactOS: always
And if being active we see that the performance of the machine degrades enough or we are simply not happy with the results obtained, we can disable the function using the following command: Compact / CompactOS: never
In both cases We will have to wait for the system to compress or decompress the files on the computer, so be patient when executing this function on your computers.
Have you already tried this function on your system? What result has it given you? Was it what you expected or is the performance of your device degraded?