How To Compress Games And Programs In Windows 10

Is your Windows 10 PC’s drive running out of free space? Want to compress games and programs to use less disk space without affecting performance? In this guide, we will see how to compress games and programs to free up drive space.

CompactGUI to compress games and programs

CompactGUI is the graphical version of the Compact OS tool built into Windows 10. The tool allows you to compress games and apps folders so that you can free up GBs of disk space. With the CompactGUI tool, you will be able to reduce the size of games and programs by up to 60%.

Before we tell you how to use the CompactGUI tool, let’s have a look at the built-in Compact OS tool. The Compact OS is a command line utility that can compress the entire Windows 10 operating system to reduce the free up disk space. We have covered about this in our how to compress Windows 10 installation to reduce disk space usage guide.

When you compress a game using CompactGUI tool, the game can run from compressed files with very little or negligible performance loss.

According to the developer of the tool, the new compression algorithm introduced in Windows 10 for the Compact OS feature is similar NTFS-LZNT1 compression (right-click > properties > compress to save space) that we all have used but much more efficient, multi-threaded, and designed for use on executable programs with a negligible performance loss.

For instance, with CompactGUI tool, you can reduce the size of the Adobe Photoshop folder from 1.71 GB to 886 MB. In our test, the program managed to reduce the Office 365 folder size from 2.04 GB to 1.1 GB.

In addition to games and programs, you can compress any folder on your Windows 10 PC using the CompactGUI utility.

The CompactGUI tool offers four compression methods:

1. XPRESS4K

2. XPRESS8K

3. XPRESS16K

4. LZX

We recommend XPRESS8K or XPRESS16K to compress games and programs. The XPRESS4K is the fastest compression method but might not free up a substantial amount of free space. The LZX method compression is the slowest but reduces the size of games and programs dramatically. The catch is that highly compressed files might add more load on your CPU and might affect the overall performance.

Use CompactGUI to compress games and apps in Windows 10

Here is how to use the CompactGUI tool to compress games and programs in Windows 10.

Step 1: Download CompactGUI newest version from this official page. Run the same. Windows Defender SmartScreen filter might warn you from running this program. The program is safe to run.

Step 2: On the home page, select the folder of the game or program that you want to compress. We are selecting Microsoft Office 365 folder whose size 2.04 GB before compression.

Step 3: In the following screen, select a compression type, make sure that Compress subfolders option is selected, and then click Compress Folder button to begin the compression. We are using XPRESS8K compression.

When the folder is being compressed, you can see the progress and files and folders that are being compressed.

Step 4: Once the compression is finished, you can see the new size of the folder. As you can see, on our test PC, the XPRESS8K expression managed to bring down the folder size by 45% which is very good considering that there is very minimal or no performance drop.

We suggest you to immediately open the program or game after compressing the folder to check the performance of the game or program. If you are not happy, click the Uncompress Folder button uncompress the folder.