-----Original Message-----
From: Westly M Montroos <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Saturday, February 14, 1998 11:07 PM
Subject: Compressing


>First question, when I am installing a program, can I install a program on
>drive H?
yes u can, altho u havent mentioned whether the drive is a 'free drive' or a
backup drive...
a frre drive (ill leave the tech stuff out) is usually another partition u
may have ceated just for the heck of it!
in case u didnt the dirve is propbaly a cache that the compression proggy is
using!

a bckup drive is created automatically when u compress ne dirve.. due to the
high level of risk involved in compression backing up data is a VERY good
idea!


>Second question, when I compress my hard drive, where do the free spaces
go?
they dont 'go' anywhere... try and think of ur data as a peice of paper...
now u fold it up for storage as it will require less space that way... but
when u need to use that peice of paper ull need to unfold it back to its
original size!!

compression of drives works pretty much in the same way, it compresses files
much like ne compression proggy like 'pkzip' or 'rar' and when u require
these files they are 'un-compressed' back into their original form!

<techie alert! techie alert!!> drive compression programs free up slack or
wasted space on ur HDD,
slack space is the HDD real estate that a file is assigned to store itself,
quite often more space is assigned to a file than it needs, but due to the
nature of data storage dos or windows can do nothing about it...
think of it like this u have a 5foot recangle and u have to fit that onto a
4foot rectangle, obvilously u cant do that.. so ull need another 4foot (u
can only use 4foot rectangles) rectangle and put the them together to fit
the large retangle on top of them... invariably, there will be some space
wasted  of the smaller rectangles which rthe larger rectangle cud'nt cover!

this is the same logic behind slack space.. using a compression drive or
windows NT or OS2 warp the whole concept of slack space is moot!!

regards,
gza
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