Repartitioning is quite a lot of work. First, you have to back up theentire drive, then repartition it, format each of the new logical drives, reinstall Windows, and finally restore your backup.
If you're willing to pay for the convenience, you can use PowerQuest's PartitionMagic utility to shrink your existing partition and createnew ones in the resulting free space. Reducing your 1.6Gb C: drive to just under 1Mb will save you many megabytes of wasted "cluster slack."
But if you're not up to repartitioning, then yes, you can just compress the drive. Disk compression utilities combine all the files on your disk into one large compressed volume file.
If you're using Windows 95 and already own Microsoft Plus, I recommend its DriveSpace 3 utility, which supports compressed volumes as large as 2Gb and uses economical 512-byte clusters.
Unavoidably, disk compression does slow your system's performance, because files are compressed and decompressed each time they're written to and read from the hard disk. But on a Pentium system like yours, you shouldn't experience any noticeable slowdown.
If you do, DriveSpace 3 lets your compressed volume file contain both compressed and uncompressed files, so you can choose not to compress applications or documents that you use regularly.
- Scott Spanbauer