Ah, those wide, open spaces

Home Office Computing, Feb, 1998 by Darren Gladstone

UTILITY             FreeSpace Good 1/2

Requirements        WIN 95 8MB of RAM, 2.5MB of hard-disk
                    space, an overstuffed hard disk
List Price          $49.95 (READER SERVICE 118)
Manufacturer        Mijenix, 608-277-1981, 800-MIJENIX,
                    www.mijenix.com

RATINGS

   The one-to-four-star ratings     Excellent
      are based on performance,     ****
       features, setup, ease of     Good
                                    ***
learning and use, availability,     Fair
             warranty, support,     **
      documentation, and price.     Poor
                                    *

It's a fact of life--you will run out of hard-disk space. As programs pile on the features, Web browsers store cookies, and we scan paper documents, your previously roomy hard disk looks smaller than a shoebox. Mijenix FreeSpace frees up valuable hard-disk space without causing you to lose access to your programs or data.

FreeSpace is a compression utility that shrinks burly files to a manageable size. Most impressive is that you can shrink virtually anything on your PC--data or applications--and still run the program or view and edit the file in its compressed state. Are you squeaking the last byte out of your hard disk? No problem. With FreeSpace running in the background, you can sit back and watch your disk space grow.

This intelligent wizard-driven utility leaves nothing to chance. If you want to free up a specific amount of hard-disk space, simply type in how many megabytes you need and FreeSpace will find the best candidates for the task. Another option is to shrink folders in Explorer. Still not enough? We selected file types so that the next time we download several large images, FreeSpace will automatically shrink them. And if you're exporting a compressed file, the program knows to decompress it before transmission.

For our tests, we wanted to see how much space we could free up on our PC's tiny 1.3GB hard disk. First, we reduced Office 97, America Online, Internet Explorer 4.0, and others; then we sent FreeSpace out to hunt for graphics files and shrink them on sight. In a few minutes, we recovered nearly 250MB. The real surprise, however, came when we ran the applications and found no noticeable lag in response time. If your hard disk needs some tightening up, conquer FreeSpace.