We are always looking for new ways to save space on our hard drive, so we present a program that allows you to reduce the size of installed environments on your computer. Specifically, the service reduces EXE, DLL, etc. files located in the “Program Files” and “Program Files (x86)” folders. When you run the compressed programs, they remain as stable as before compression.
The tool we will use is a command-line program built into Windows 10, “compact.exe”, but we will need the help of “CompactGUI”, a free environment that provides us with a graphical interface. By using a native Windows platform, compression will be performed in NTFS format.
How to compress installed programs on Windows 10?
Step 1: First, you need to run the portable and free program “CompactGUI”. To do this, download the executable (.EXE) and run it as Administrator.
Step 2: Inside its interface, you will need to select the option “Select Target Folder” and from there choose the “Program Files” folder or the “Program Files (x86)” folder.
Step 3: At this point you will see several compression algorithms: XPRESS4K, XPRESS8K, XPRESS16K, and LZX. There you will need to select the one that suits each program best, we recommend you do a little research on each environment. If you want to make things easier, choose the default compression (XPRESS8K). In our tests it has worked perfectly and has also compressed subfolders.
Step 4: In the lower right corner, you will see the “Compress folder” button, click on it and compression will begin. When the process finishes you will see the reduction of files in percentages.
As you can see, compressing EXE and DLL files is really simple and the size difference using this method is notable. In our tests we have reduced to 134 MB per installed program.
Now we will teach you how to decompress the compressed folders. You will also need to run the program as Administrator, select the destination folder, and then click on “Analyze folder”. When the process finishes you will need to select “Uncompress Folder” to uncompress the folder.
If you have many programs installed on your hard drive and you don't want to uninstall them, the option of compressing the entire “Program Files” folder will be very appropriate.
