A little-known resource within Windows 10 and 11 is compact.exe, an integrated utility that lets us compress files and/or folders on NTFS partitions. While the operating system's interface offers an isolated option to enable that compression, compact.exe becomes much more powerful when we run it ourselves, or if we use as an alternative the dedicated environment CompactGUI, which directly accesses the Windows API to achieve the same effect.
Installing games on solid-state drives has stopped being a simple recommendation. In fact, many titles already require them to guarantee sufficiently short access times, and if we look closely at current prices (less than 60 euros per terabyte), on the surface it doesn't make sense to think too much about it.
However, each user is a universe, and not everyone can face that storage upgrade in the short term. Nobody likes having just one or two games installed due to a space limitation, so, in the absence of budget to add an extra drive, we have to consider the possibility of compressing data. That's how we get to CompactGUI.
CompactGUI: Easily Compress Files and Folders on Windows 10/11
CompactGUI is a tool created by IridiumIO on GitHub. After a long pause in development (a little over a year between builds), CompactGUI returned to the fray in recent weeks, introducing version 3.0. Besides rebuilding its entire interface and moving to .NET 6, CompactGUI expands the list of extensions that don't compress well, incorporates a scale parameter for the interface (very useful on screens lower than 800 pixels in height), and allows us to monitor folders that have already been compressed (any later modification, like a massive update, can decompress the affected files).
CompactGUI now accesses the Win32 API without going through compact.exe to compress files, so the availability of algorithms remains the same: Three levels of XPRESS (4K, 8K, and 16K), and LZX. XPRESS 4K is the fastest option, XPRESS 8K and 16K offer a better balance between compression and performance, and LZX aims for maximum compression levels, but adds a small overhead on the processor.
Finally, CompactGUI users have created a database with more than 5,000 games compressed with this tool. The information hasn't been updated since May 2021, but it remains a good reference point to check if it's worth compressing a game or not. For example, Doom Eternal almost doesn't compress (between 4 and 5 percent), while Subnautica exceeds 40 percent. Link below!
(Editor's note: The program requires .NET 6, or alternatively, we can download its portable version that includes all necessary modules)
Official site and download: Click here
How to download programs from GitHub: Click here
