Windows 10 is a very powerful and chunky operating system, full of features and, consequently, chunky which takes up considerable space on the PC disk. On normal desktop computers and traditional laptops this of the size should not be a problem, but if you are using a laptop with a more limited memory SSD or if you have bought a Windows 10 convertible tablet, then the problem of a limited or insufficient disk space can be important.
For this reason Microsoft has added a compression feature in Windows 10 so that it can recover space from the system installation.
By activating Compact OS in Windows 10 you can reduce the size of the files extracted at the time of installation and recover a lot of space on the disk or on the SSD memory unit .
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Before proceeding, however, I recommend a backup of the important files and a look at the official guide for Compact OS not very simple and to the post on the Microsoft blog in English but clearer.
Below, let's see how to manually activate Windows 10 compression with Compact OS by running a few simple commands.
The only requirement is that you have administrator rights on the computer and that you can then run the command prompt as an administrator.
To do this, press the Windows-X keys together and click on Command Prompt (administrator).
First of all, run the command:
Compact.exe / CompactOS: query
This is to know if Compact OS mode is active or not on the computer .
NOTE: If you receive the message The system is not in the compact state because Windows has determined that it is not useful for this system, it means that compression is not necessary but can still be done manually.
To activate Compact OS in Windows 10 use the command:
Compact.exe / CompactOS: always
The compression process may take some time and will have variable disk space recovery depending on the system configuration.
In general, the recovery can be between 1 and 4 GB of free space.
Keep in mind that this compression can have minimal impact on the overall performance of the computer, since the files will have to be decompressed when they are used.
To disable this Compact OS feature in Windows 10 the command to be executed is instead:
Compact.exe / CompactOS: never
The previously compressed files will be decompressed and will take up more disk space.
