This is a great trick to save a few gigabytes of space on the OS, especially if you have a smaller mSata SSD for the boot drive.
- Right click the Start button > Command Prompt (Admin)
- Run the following command to compress OS files
Compact.exe /CompactOS:always
- The command takes about 10 minutes to complete depending on your hard drive and will free about 3 GB of space
Reverting the Compression
If for some reason you want to undo this change you can use the steps below to decompress the OS files
- Right click the Start button > Command Prompt (Admin)
- Run the following command to compress OS files
Compact.exe /CompactOS:never