Free up some hard drive space on your XP machine.
This tip will free up some hard drive space on a Windows XP SP2 machine. It requires that the drive be formatted NTFS (more than likely it is unless you upgraded from a previous version of Windows that used the FAT32 file system - see note below).
When you install Service Pack 2, it creates a folder under the Windows folder called ServicePackFiles\i386 - the files placed into this folder take up about 500 MB of space. You can regain much of this space by following the instructions below.
- 1. Right-click the ServicePackFiles folder and select the Properties command.
- 2. In the Attributes section of the General tab, click the Advanced button.
- 3. In the Advanced Attributes dialog box, check the box next to "Compress Contents To Save Disk Space" and click OK.
- 4. Then click OK on the Properties dialog box, .
- 5. When asked to Confirm Attribute Changes, select "Apply Changes To This Folder, Subfolders And Files" and then click OK.
After compression the files are still usable by the Operating System, but take up much less space.
NOTE: To see if your drive is formatted NTFS, right click the drive icon in My Computer and select properties. If your drive is FAT32 you can convert it to NTFS without losing any data by opening a command prompt and typing convert c: /fs:ntfs where c: is the drive you want to convert. This is a one-way street, once converted to ntfs you can't go back to FAT32 without a reformat. Once converted to NTFS, older operating systems like Win95 and Win98 will not be able to access that data, so if you are still dual booting to one of those, you may not want to do the conversion. Linux can mount NTFS partitions if you have the necessary modules loaded.
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