Programs enable users to compress with the best

How much space would 100 icons take up on the hard disk? With a sector size of 32 kilobytes, and with one icon taking about 3 kb, 100 of them would require about three megabytes of storage.

Numerous small files like icons waste a lot of space on large partitions, but to free memory it is not necessary to sweep out data from the hard disk. By using compression programs, you can compress the data into archives that require only a fraction of the original space.

Data compression is the process of encoding large data to use less storage space. Digital data is compressed by finding repeatable patterns of binary 0s and 1s. The more patterns that can be found, the more the data can be compressed. Text generally can be compressed to about 40 per cent of its original size and graphics files to between 20 and 90 per cent. Some files compress very little - it depends on the file type and the compression algorithm used.

Compression programs are especially handy while sending large files through the Internet.

Most compression programs are available on the Internet as shareware programs. The programs tested here are based on ZIP technology - a file format widely used for archives and other file formats like ARJ and RAR. These programs produce similar values for the degree of compression of popular file types, and even for the time required to compress them.

For the test we used a Pentium 200 MMX, where the programs were made to compress a 50.1 MB directory with databases, graphics and other application files. Most programs took three minutes or less to compress this directory and produced an archive of about 22.7 MB. All the programs were set to produce average compression.