[jacha]

I've heard that un-compressing the Hard Drive will improve perfomance speed. Is this true and exactly how do you do it?

[dont]

I noticed a speed-up.

Look in the properties of your C drive, bottom of the General tab. Turn off indexing as well while you are about it. This takes a while as it has to touch every file. Some might fail to uncompress because they are in use, but that is OK as you will get most of them.

[Matt151B]

Wouldn't the ones that are in use by the OS be the most important to speed improvements?

[onefish2]

Before you un-compress the drive why don't you pause for a moment to consider why Dell ships it to you compressed. There must be a reason, no?

[Matt151B]

Probably shipped that way to stop people from complaining about free space. IDK, since mine hasn't even arrived yet. As I understand it compression can be good or bad.

Good if the hard drive is the slow link. Assuming the processor can uncompress faster then the HDD can read, this allows a smaller file to be read from the HDD. Speeds things up.

Not useful if the processor will be taxed by the uncompression process to the point that the system slows down.

[medicThree]

Originally Posted by onefish2

Before you un-compress the drive why don't you pause for a moment to consider why Dell ships it to you compressed. There must be a reason, no?

If that is the way we are supposed to think, I assume that we should assume they have a good reason for giving me 1.5 gb of crapware too??

Very rarely does a system come from a manufacturer optimized for the true best performance.

[dont]

Originally Posted by onefish2

Before you un-compress the drive why don't you pause for a moment to consider why Dell ships it to you compressed. There must be a reason, no?

Onefish2: since you work for Dell, maybe you know the real reason?

I suspect the reason is that they want to only have one process for installing software on the Mini's regardless of the size of the SSD. If you only have a 4 or 8 GB SSD then you can't afford to uncompress the drive, but if you have a 16 GB (or better) then uncompressing makes sense. If they gave 16GB devices uncompressed installs and 4/8 GB devices compressed installs then they would need two install processes for the Mini.

[J.Mancine]

I'd be interested to see if anyone can actually quantify the performance increase gained by turning off drive compression.

I mean, if you are using high CPU and intensive data read/write programs (like graphics or audio processing) then it becomes pretty obvious -- for example, I am doing 24-bit multi track audio recording on mine so compression is simply not an option.

But for day to day use (web, email, word processing, etc) I really don't think the decreased performance is noticeable enough to outweigh the increased disk space. We're probably talking differences in fractions of fractions of seconds. To put it conversely, the increase in performance from turning off compression is not significant enough to give up the extra SSD space you get by leaving it turned on.

All that being said, there is a happy medium built into XP. Instead of enabling entire drive compression, just use the "compress old files" function in the disk maintenance program...that way the files you use regularly remain uncompressed, and the files that are rarely used are compressed to save space.

[onefish2]

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that the reason its compressed is because it works better that way from a read/write perspective. And it optimizes space. Dell might not make the nicest stuff or the coolest stuff but its still a computer manufacturer and the product groups that design and test these things are made up of engineers. Real engineers with degrees that design systems for a reason.

And yes I work for Dell. However I have nothing to do with client product nor consumer product. Even though I do have a very good Windows background, I consider myself more of a Linux guy.

I am participating on this board in my free time because I like this little laptop of mine that runs Ubuntu. I enjoy reading about all the other early adopters of this product and their trials and tribulations with it. I also enjoy helping out the other forum members.

[medicThree]

My mini performs loads better uncompressed running chrome to surf the web. It would hang up constantly if I opened more than 3 or 4 tabs, and now with it off, it doesn't have a problem with the 15 I have open right now.