azagahl

I was hoping for a bit more detailed advice, perhaps some benchmarks or rules of thumb. Oh well, I should have anticipated a kneejerk "c0mpr3ssion is 4 l0zerS" message. If you think about it for more than a minute, with a fast enough CPU, and slow enough hard disk, compression is guaranteed to increase system performance. On a two- or more core system, where some cores are idle 99% of the time, its worth considering.

Can XP be sped up with Windows File Compression or UPX to compress exe and DLL files? It seems like my dual-core CPU and network are idle almost all the time but XP seems very sluggish. I'm guessing that the harddrive is the bottleneck. Probably its faster to read a Windows-compressed file and decompress it on a fast CPU, than to have to read a file 2x as big from the slow hard disk. I don't think it just this one harddrive that's crappy, the harddrive seems to be a bottleneck on most XP PC's I've seen recently, especially on dual-core systems. Thanks for any suggestions you have.