On 22 Feb 98 at 11:44, David Jonathan Justman wrote:

> 1.  I have about 800Mb in use on my 1.5Gb hard Disk, and Nuts & Bolts
> reports that about 200Mb out of the 800 is slack.  How do I get rid of
> it?

  "Slack" space is space between the last data byte of a file, and
the end of the last cluster of file space allocated for that file.
[Clusters are also called "allocation units".]
  If you're seeing a lot of slack space, there are two basic causes:

1.  You have a lot of files.  On average, each file winds up with
half a cluster of slack space.

2.  You have large clusters.  With 16-bit FAT, the number of clusters
on a volume is limited to 64K, and so the cluster size is increased
on larger volumes.

  Solutions (in rough order of reliability/stability):

1.  Live with it.

2.  Adjust partition sizes, and thus cluster sizes, with Partition
Magic or other such utilities.

3.  Install FAT32 (OSR2).

4.  Compress your drive using DriveSpace or similar.

> 2.  I have recently upgraded to 64Mb of RAM, and rarely hear the disk
> being accessed at all, except on bootup and occasionally during giant
> downloads, or once a session when downloading new mail.  Should I care
> about the compactness of my disk at all?

  You're not hitting virtual memory much, so there's a limit to how
much benefit you could get from fine-tuning it.  I guess that's
basically a "no".

David G