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I know that I have been tempted to press that button and squeeze a little more disk space out of my computer instead or archiving off music or pictures, but our experience with file compression on a Windows machine has not been good. It makes recovering deleted files much more difficult, but the real problem that we see with most computers that have done this has been poor performance.

Going back and unchecking the box to compress files on your hard drive stops windows from doing this with new files, but it doesn’t seem to go back and clear out the compression that it has already done on your existing files.

Fortunately there is a command that you can run on your computer to undo this. Depending on how many files you have and the speed of your computer this can take a few hours.

compact /u/s/a/i/q

This command uncompresses, subfolders, hidden and system files, continues proccessing if it runs into an error, and only reports the most essential information.