By Abhinav Raj
Publication Date: 2026-10-02 13:00:00
Everyone wants just a little bit of more room on their drive, no matter whether it’s a multi-terabyte Gen 5 NVMe or a 500GB SATA SSD. And when buying more isn’t an option, the next best thing is keeping the drive you have as lean as possible by clearing space for apps and services that you use.
A lot of third-party utilities offer to deep-clean your PC and reclaim gigabytes of storage, and sure enough, maybe some of them will do just that after they have your credit card details and your email address. But, if you’re on Windows 11, there’s a tool that can do it that’s already on your machine, and Microsoft has barely mentioned it. Here’s how the OS’s built-in compression mode works, and what it gave me back.
Windows has a compression mode it never puts in front of you
It can run the whole OS from compressed files and save you some storage space
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