PC FAQs & Answers

The program DRIVESPACE 3 that comes with the CD Version of Win95 works with floppies as well as hard drives. For all of ya'll that have the floppy installed version of Win95 you're in luck. There is an upgraded version of DRIVESPACE 3 available on the PLUSPAK. DRIVESPACE 3 is fast efficient and most important safe to use.

To get started launch DriveSpace 3 from the Submenu:

DRIVESPACE 3 opens with a screen displaying all drive available for compression. You'll notice the CD-ROM is not listed because you can't compress them or any other read only drives. Now select the floppy drive you want to increase the capacity on A: or B:.

For those who that have the newest release of DRIVESPACE 3 the next screen will let you pick the compression method. Launch this program from the MenuBar under Avanced | Settings. If you are using a Pentium or equal power machine, I would recommend the Hi-Pack compression.

However, if you have a 486 or slower processor this compression setting will probably tax system performance. You will notice slow mouse and keyboard response along with poor disk access time. If this is the case choose the Standard Method.

There is also a third choice that will let you use standard compression only when you disk is running low on space. The default is about 90% but, you can set this to whatever you prefer. At the bottom there is a setting to Automatically Mount Compressed Drives.

When you compress a floppy you must mount it before you can use it. So, by selecting this option you will be able to use a compressed disk like any other disk.

At this point you have to compress the disk. To do this pull down the Menu Bar in the DriveSpace 3 program under Drive heading pick Compress. After the compression program has finished you will find you have quite a bit more space available on the disk.

This amount will fluctuate depending on the file types. Some file type squander disk space. But, on the average you will reclaim about 50% of space used on the disk.