If you want to disable the NTFS compression feature in Windows 7, you can easily do that via the registry. Here’s how.
The compression feature is a great way to save disk space on NTFS hard drives. Should you decide that you don’t need this feature,you can disable the NTFS file compression completely by applying the registry tweak below. You can either download our registry file or do it manually (recommended). Always create a backup of your registry before you change the registry in any way.
Disable Compression Automatically via Registry Tweak
You can download our registry tweak to disable the NTFS encryption:
Download: Disable Compression in Windows 7 Registry File
Disable Compression Manually
1. Step Open the registry
2. Step Uncollapse HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/Filesystem
3. Step Select Filesystem and then in the right pane double-click on the item NtfsDisableCompression
4. Step Change the value to 1 to disable the compression:
Did this work for you? Let us know if you have any problems or questions related to NTFS compression.
Make sure to check out our category of tutorials for more useful registry tweaks! Below are some related posts:
It is not necessary to edit the registry to turn off disk compression in Windows 7. In Computer, right-click on Local Disk (C:) drive and click on Properties. On the Properties dialog box you will see a check box that you can uncheck of disk compression is on. If it is not checked, then it is not on. Obviously, if it is unchecked, you can check it to turn it on, but it will use system resources, so you need to weigh whether you need power or space.
@ dianemathtutor:
Um no… the checkbox found via Properties on the hardrive is to compress the entire drive in one shot. If you check this off, it will compress the entire drive when you click OK.
The above article shows how to disable compression entirely so it can’t be invoked at all.
To disable compression by changing the value 0 to 1 in
NtfsDisableCompression in Windows 7 64-bit Registry does not seem to work properly.
Any better suggestion?
My own windows-theme picture that are png-compressed, are strongly jpg-compressed like before and some of them looks like – well – trash.
Open a command prompt using the right click “run as administrator”. Then run “fsutil behavior set disableCompression 1” and reboot. This will disable NTFS compression for all volumes. Existin compressed files will stay compressed and can still be read. You will not be able to enable compression on any new files.