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The ‘Disk Cleanup’ menu features ‘Compress Old File’. What are these files and how do they get generated?

After a Disk Cleanup operation, I get this message, “You can use Disk Cleanup to free up to 1,296 KB of Disk space on (C). Compress Old files-1264KB and Web Client/Publisher Temporary Files-32KB.”

Why have these files not been cleaned up? Please explain.

Vasant Damle

The disk cleanup tool in windows XP is used to clean up unwanted or unused files and allows you to increase the free space in the disk.

To open the disk clean up, please Click Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Cleanup.

You will get a prompt to select a Drive. Disk Cleanup will investigate the drive and display how much space the Disk Cleanup can free in the selected drive.

The result will also categorise the file space used for different purposes — such as Temporary Internet Files, Recycle Bin, Temporary Files, Compressed Old files, Web Client/ Publisher Temporary Files and others. There is a check box for each of these items. It lists the size of file space that is recoverable for each category.

To clean up, the check box has to be selected for each category. Some of the categories have View Files button to view the contents.

Only the windows installed drive has all the category of files for clean up. Other drives have only a few categories.

Temporary Internet Files, Downloaded Program Files, Setup Log Files are some categories listed only in Windows installed drive, say C:

In Windows XP, if there are files that have not been read or modified for a longer period of time and if the check box “Compress old files” is selected in Disk Cleanup, the Disk Cleanup starts compressing these files to reduce the file size they occupy.

The “Options” button in “Compress Old File” Category specifies how many days to wait before non-accessed files are compressed.

By default, this is set to 50 days. Files that are not accessed for 50 days are compressed. These files are not deleted. They can still be accessed when required.

The size displayed for “Compress old files” is an approximate value. The compression ratio varies depending upon the type of file.

The “WebClient/Publisher Temporary files” are files maintained by the service as cache of accessed files.

These are kept in the disk to improve performance.

It is also possible to automate the disk cleanup task and schedule it.

More details on this are available at this URL: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315246

Solution by P. Natarajan

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