Last week I spent almost 12 hours remotely working on and optimizing a 32-bit Win7 machine via LogMeIn. The primary reason for the computer's slowness was several toolbars, etc... that were running in the background, somehow managing to hog up 90% of the customer's internet bandwidth, and also that the partitioned drive was more than 90% full on the system partition.
So after I removed the malware, and successfully repartitioned the Sytem Drive (making it larger) and then moved some of the data off the system partition to the data partition, I had the completely brilliantly stupid idea that I would "compress" the drive.
"Drive Compression" It just sounds like a good idea when you think about it. Taking something "big" and making into something "small". How nice. And Microsoft lets you do it too, it's a "free feature" that you can get in the hard drive's "Properties" menu. Such a nice gesture from Microsoft, to give you this free feature. Such lovely people.
What they DON'T tell you is that it might take 10 hours to complete. They also don't tell you that you can't stop it once it starts without causing problems. They don't give you any hint at all that you are driving 120 mph down the freeway in the wrong lane and head right into oncoming traffic.
On reboot, my customer informs me that she has a message to the effect that "DKY4B is compressed. Cannot Boot" or similar. It was a brick. I won't go into details, but the customer was on a different continent and she had to hire a dramatically less-qualified "Tech" to come over the next morning and fix my mess. He couldn't get there right away, because he wasn't finished shoveling the manure out of the stables at his day job.
TSF, for all I've learned here, you've never once given me any warning about this "Drive Compression" catastrophe, yet when I Google any of the failure-to-boot texts, it's like everyone on the planet (but me) has had this problem, and I'm the idiot that was the last to find out. So, in hope of saving someone else from this disaster, I'd recommend to NEVER under any circumstances compress a hard drive. From what I've read, even when it's "successful" it slows down the overall operation of the computer and you are worse off for having done it than if you would have simply moved the data off the hard drive, or purchased another one.
Is this "common knowledge" amongst computer techs? Or new information for most people?
So after I removed the malware, and successfully repartitioned the Sytem Drive (making it larger) and then moved some of the data off the system partition to the data partition, I had the completely brilliantly stupid idea that I would "compress" the drive.
"Drive Compression" It just sounds like a good idea when you think about it. Taking something "big" and making into something "small". How nice. And Microsoft lets you do it too, it's a "free feature" that you can get in the hard drive's "Properties" menu. Such a nice gesture from Microsoft, to give you this free feature. Such lovely people.
What they DON'T tell you is that it might take 10 hours to complete. They also don't tell you that you can't stop it once it starts without causing problems. They don't give you any hint at all that you are driving 120 mph down the freeway in the wrong lane and head right into oncoming traffic.
On reboot, my customer informs me that she has a message to the effect that "DKY4B is compressed. Cannot Boot" or similar. It was a brick. I won't go into details, but the customer was on a different continent and she had to hire a dramatically less-qualified "Tech" to come over the next morning and fix my mess. He couldn't get there right away, because he wasn't finished shoveling the manure out of the stables at his day job.
TSF, for all I've learned here, you've never once given me any warning about this "Drive Compression" catastrophe, yet when I Google any of the failure-to-boot texts, it's like everyone on the planet (but me) has had this problem, and I'm the idiot that was the last to find out. So, in hope of saving someone else from this disaster, I'd recommend to NEVER under any circumstances compress a hard drive. From what I've read, even when it's "successful" it slows down the overall operation of the computer and you are worse off for having done it than if you would have simply moved the data off the hard drive, or purchased another one.
Is this "common knowledge" amongst computer techs? Or new information for most people?