Be careful with VHDs and Windows XP Compressed Folders

re: Be careful with VHDs and Windows XP Compressed Folders

Graham P — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 16:04:16 GMT

It's not a problem in Windows 7. I have my whole OS drive on NTFS compression and it contains virtual machine VHD's larger than 4GB and there is not problem with them at all, so I guess Microsoft fixed this problem since Window XP.

re: Be careful with VHDs and Windows XP Compressed Folders

Eric Lee — Mon, 28 May 2007 23:44:38 GMT

Hey,

Just wanted to say thanks for all the tips you've posted. You've saved me tons of time and I really appreciated. Thanks for the great work!

Eric.

re: Be careful with VHDs and Windows XP Compressed Folders

Norman Diamond — Mon, 28 May 2007 06:11:55 GMT

Friday, May 25, 2007 7:33 AM by Mike Dimmick

> in the Vista Beta/RC phase, Compressed Folders

> was horrendously slow.

In RTM, it seems to be horrendously slow in unpacking, but it's also horrendously slow in copying an ordinary folder.

Furthermore, if the zip file was copied from another machine, the "help and support" instructions say that the user should enable Outlook Express and then use Outlook Express to unblock the zip file, which is a pretty nice garbage combination of garbages.

[In XP]

> The workaround for this problem is of course

> 'use a different ZIP product'

Oh yeah, and that's true in Vista too.

Now is there a way to disable the broken built-in functionality so that XP will *only* use a different zip product...

re: Be careful with VHDs and Windows XP Compressed Folders

william — Sun, 27 May 2007 05:43:31 GMT

This "compressed folders" feature is not the same as the ntfs compression, right? I remember I used to compress lots of folders and files using the ntfs compression without any problem...

re: Be careful with VHDs and Windows XP Compressed Folders

DosFreak — Sun, 27 May 2007 05:30:32 GMT

It can be the difference between fitting all of your files on 1 CD vs 2 CD's...

Any person that doesn't care about decent compression will just use zip. For those of us that need better compression we use that tools that do so. .7z\.rar are hardly the best compression formats but they do have the best GUI programs and options than other formats that have far better compression.

Besides, you don't have to use the highest compression options for .7z. Usually doing so is a waste of time. The default options are just fine and compress better than zip.

As far as no one knowing what a .7z is. Judging by my users at work they don't even know what a .zip is. All they care is if the click on it and can open it that it does so. As long as the OS supports it then it's fine. Sadly most people use Windows which by default AFAIK only supports .zip.

re: Be careful with VHDs and Windows XP Compressed Folders

Xepol — Sat, 26 May 2007 16:51:01 GMT

Dan -> If you don't use the highest compression ration out of 7z, then you might as well use something more common. My experiences with 7z to date have marked it slow not just in compressing but in decompressing as well.

Frankly, I can't see why I would want to use it tho. Back when Arj and Zip and Zoo were all new, 10% space reduction was a huge deal with floppies being the storage media of choice and 1200baud being the high end speed of the day. Now, do you really think shaving 100k of a 600mb file really justifies the huge archiving delay or the fact that almost no one has any clue what a 7z file is??

I guess I just don't see what problem 7z is the solution to.

re: Be careful with VHDs and Windows XP Compressed Folders

Robert Aitchison — Fri, 25 May 2007 23:21:37 GMT

Agreed with Dan, all Open Source software IS freeware but not all freeware is open source obviously.

There are lots of good closed source freeware apps our there including Opera, Trillian Basic, Irfanview, Spybot Search & Destroy and CDBurnerXP Pro. In the past I would have included µTorrent and all the sysinternals tools but those are now owned by non-trustworthy companies which is of course the major downside to closed-source freeware.

Also let me chime in my own recommendation for 7-Zip.

re: Be careful with VHDs and Windows XP Compressed Folders

Dan — Fri, 25 May 2007 16:55:31 GMT

DosFreak: Well SORRY! :P Open Source is, technically, a subset of freeware. I consider any free software I don't have to pay for "freeware". It also helps I didn't know it was OSS.

Moz: Yeah, but I just don't like WinZip. Probably because my cousins' have it on their comps and it makes you wait 30 seconds every time you run it before you can do anything until you buy it.

Norman: The corruption happens when you CREATE ZIPs using Compressed Folders. I imagine there's no problem extracting large ZIPs made with other applications.

Xepol: 7Zip is only really slow if you choose the highest compression ratio, but even then I find the slow speed acceptable, since you only usually need to compress once, and the decompression speed is what really matters (and I find it acceptable).

re: Be careful with VHDs and Windows XP Compressed Folders

Mike Dimmick — Fri, 25 May 2007 14:33:59 GMT

Lorenzo: in the Vista Beta/RC phase, Compressed Folders was horrendously slow. I've no idea if it was fixed for RTM, but WinZip was orders of magnitude faster.

I'm fairly sure WinZip 9.0 SR-1 could also handle 64-bit ZIP files and large (>4GB) files within a ZIP. The ZIP64 scheme goes back to PKzip 4.5 according to the 'version needed to extract' field documentation in the ZIP spec at http://www.pkware.com/documents/casestudies/APPNOTE.TXT.

Norman: you know how MS change control works. A problem in a released product is fixed only if a customer asks for a fix. The workaround for this problem is of course 'use a different ZIP product', of which there are plenty, so probably no-one has asked for a fix and even if they had the servicing team would not have agreed to do one. Service Packs almost always only include a rollup of hotfixes, with a few other targeted fixes - XP SP2 was exceptional, but concentrated on security, WiFi and a few other areas. A fix to this was never going to get into the service pack.

re: Be careful with VHDs and Windows XP Compressed Folders

Lorenzo Barbieri — Fri, 25 May 2007 11:12:22 GMT

Do you know if Vista's compressed folders are ok?