This address does exist within Windows but it’s well hidden.  One time when you will see it though is when you install the operating system and with Windows 7 (and Vista) it is vitally important to make certain you choose the right one.

This wasn’t a problem even a few short years ago as computers only came with a single hard drive.  With the cost of hard drive storage still tumbling though and capacities increasing, it’s becoming more and more common to find two hard disks inside a new PC and even some high-end laptops.

These disks are labelled by Windows, Disc 0, Disc 1, Disc 2 and so on with Disc 0 (zero) being the critical one to the operating system.  This is the disc on which you really should install your copy of Windows.

There’s no hard and fast rule here that says you absolutely must install Windows on this drive, in fact it will boot merrily from any hard disk in your PC and from any partition on that drive.  Windows often places a 100Mb System partition at the beginning of Disk 0 though.  This hidden partition stores the boot information for your PC.  It’s completely separate from your Windows installation but absolutely critical.

The boot menu resides here, if you don’t have this partition you won’t be able to start your PC without detailed rebuilding of the boot system, if it’s even possible to do so as sometimes it’s not.  Either way the process is very technical and not for the faint of heart.

If you have this System partition on a separate physical hard disk to your copy of Windows you are doubling your chances that a hard disk failure will render your system unusable.  It might also be the case that you want to swap this disc out for a larger one, or remove it completely.  This can also render your copy of Windows unusable.

Hard disks, let’s not forget, are some of the very few remaining components in your PC to have mechanical moving parts (unless you’re lucky and rich enough to be able to afford a solid state disk).  The only other moving parts in your PC are fans if that’s any indication of how old the technology now is.  These moving parts can be placed under tremendous physical strain by heavy or prolonged use.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example here.  You have installed Windows 7 on Disc 1 in your computer.  This being the second physical hard disk inside the case.  Disc 0 will always carry the System boot partition so if either one of those hard disks fails you lose access to your copy of Windows.

If you instead install your copy of Windows on Disc 0 (zero) then the other disc can fail and you’ll not lose access to your copy of Windows.  Let’s not forget that on a dual hard disk system the disc that doesn’t contain a copy of Windows will commonly be used for file storage.

It’s an easy error to install Windows Vista or Windows 7 onto the wrong physical disc.  Perhaps the leads have been swapped onto the motherboard ports during maintenance or the build of the PC so that the disk on the top of the pile in the case, the one you’d assume was disc 0 now isn’t.  Alas the only way around the problem should issues occur with this is a complete reinstall, which can take many hours when you factor in all your software and settings changes.

So the next time you come to install a copy of Windows Vista or Windows 7, have a good look at the list of available disks and partitions, and make certain you choose Disc 0 for your installation.

Of course {zip/rar}ing everything is a no-go; nobody wants to have to open an archive before being able to launch an application. So what?
Enter UPX, the reference packer for executable files. UPX compresses executable files (mostly .exe and .dll under Windows), but contrarily to zip/rar/whatever, it keeps them executable, also preserving  their properties (icon, version…). All this at the cost of a completely unnoticeable performance hit when starting the application. Sounds good? Let’s compress everything executable in this Dropbox that is dangerously close to reaching its 2GB limit.

1. Download UPX from SourceForge and extract it to <upxFolder>.
2. Open a command prompt and browse to <upxFolder> (you can find the command prompt in Start > Accessories or run it via Windows+R, then “cmd”. Use “cd FolderName” to navigate the filesystem).
3. Run upx.exe to have a look at the options available. I’ll use -9 but you can adjust this (for example if you feel a performance hit on an old machine –I don’t–), and -v to have verbose output. Now, navigate to the folder of a program you want to compress and run your freshly-baked command:
   "<upxFolder>\upx.exe" -9 -v *.exe *.dll
   (replace <upxFolder> adequately, and keep the quotes around the path, or spaces will cause problems)
4. You’ll see the files being compressed, the compression ratio, as well as the occasional “AlreadyPackedException: already packed by UPX“, or “CantPackException: .NET files (win32/net) are not yet supported“, or “IOException: read error: Invalid argument“. These errors are all OK, UPX just notifies you that it left the file untouched.

Woot, you already gained 50MB by just compressing big ol’Inkscape.

Of course you now want to do this on ALL the executables in a folder. But you’re lazy, and the perspective of running this line inside hundreds of subfolders leaves you bleak. Lucky you, I’m lazy too, so I dug Stack Overflow to assemble a script that will do the operation recursively.

1. Paste this in a text file (of course adjusting the main line like we did before) you will rename to something like upxRecursive.bat
   for /r /d %%x in (*) do (
pushd "%%x"
"<upxFolder>\upx.exe" -9 -v *.exe *.dll
popd
)
pause
2. Move this batch file inside your Dropbox folder, launch it and see the magic. This will take a long time on a big folder filled with executable files, but will seriously slim it down. In my case, I saved 400MB (from 1.7GB to 1.3GB), leaving me with plenty of space for more crap.

Final notes:

• UPX has been in development for a long time and is praised for its extreme stability and reliability, but could possibly leave you with some exotic executable files that won’t run after compression. I personally never occurred to me, but accidents happen. In this case, use "<upxFolder>\upx.exe" -d problematicFile.exe to get an uncompressed version. Note it won’t be byte-identical, if you want to be able to get back to byte-identical versions, you should add the --exact switch at compression time.
  By the way, the folks at PortableApps.com pack all the software they release with UPX. Reassured about its reliability?
• People familiar with the win32/pe format will know that .exe and .dll are not its only valid extensions. The full list is “.exe .dll .cpl .ocx .sys .scr .drv”. However, I don’t recommend compressing sensitive files like control panel extensions or driver files, and this is why the line I suggest targets only dll and exe files. Compressing VLC is OK because you can reinstall it if UPX butchers it. Compressing critical software is not.
• I’m just repeating my previous point, but don’t want to see angry comments from people doing crazy things with this. Again, don’t do this on all C: , it -will- wreck your system. Compress executables when you really need it, and inside folders containing only reinstallable applications if things go wrong.
• UPX is multi-platform. My article focuses heavily on Windows because this is the platform where my use case comes from, but you can of course adjust this idea/script for Linux (plus you will probably have access to a saner scripting language than batch).
• EDIT: as pointed by John T. Haller in the comments, PortableApps offers AppCompactor, a graphical frontend that relies among others on UPX.

Ronan is a geek and musician living in Montreal. He likes scaring wary sysadmins with 2GB folders full of false positives and writes about software, music and life at flying molehill.

It is for instance possible to get a visual analysis of the fragmentation level of a folder or file. While it is nice to know it would not make much sense if the software would not take advantage of this feature. Defraggler makes it possible to just defrag a folder or file instead of defragmenting the complete drive.

This is of course considerably faster than defragmenting the whole hard drive and useful if you want to work with a certain application. As far as I can tell it is not faster or slower than any of the other defragmentation tools out there but as I said, the new feature makes it stick out from the rest.

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