PC Hell: How to Make Disk Cleanup Run Faster

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Disk Cleanup Stalls at Compressing Files

It can be quite annoying sometimes to run Disk Cleanup and wait such a long time whle the computer tries to calculate the Comress Old Files section. Compressing Files seems like such worthless activity now. It used to be a good thing when the hard drive was filling up and you needed more space to save data. However, now when the normal size hard drive can be anywhere from a few hundred gigs to a terabyte or more, compressing files isnt really necessary.

Luckily, there is a way to skip this step in Disk Cleanup and make the procedure very fast. Follow the steps below to delete the Compress Old Files option and speed your computer up when trying to run Disk Cleanup.

Disk Cleanup screen

1) Open the Registry Editor by going to Start, Run and Typing REGEDIT and pressing Enter (or in Windows Vista, type REGEDIT in the Search box after clicking on the Windows orb

2) Click on the plus signs(+) next to the following options

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
SOFTWARE
Microsoft
Windows
CurrentVersion
Explorer
Volume Caches

3) Right-click on the "Compress Old Files" key and choose Export, type in a name like compressfiles.reg and save it to your desktop or My Documents

4) Now Right-click on the "Compress Old Files" key and delete it

5) Close the Registry Editor and Run Disk Cleanup (it should now run much faster)

If for some reason you want to restore the Compress Old Files option in Disk Cleanup and you no longer have the reg file you saved, you can copy the following information and save it to a file called compressoldfiles.reg

Double-click on the file and it will restore the information back into your registry.

Save the info between the dashed lines to a reg file to restore Compress Old Files option

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Compress old files]
@="{B50F5260-0C21-11D2-AB56-00A0C9082678}"
"Priority"=dword:0000012c
"StateFlags"=dword:00000000
"StateFlags0001"=dword:00000000
-----------------------------------------------------------------