When I run the Disk Cleanup Utility, I get 2,729,332 in "Compress Old Files." I run it fairly frequently and there is always a very large size listed. Is this OK and can just be ignored, or is there some steps I can take to rid myself of the old files. I don't know how to find out what old files they are referring to, so I don't know whether I need them or not. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.1 person got this answerI do too

The Disk Cleanup Utility will offer to compress files that you haven't accessed recently. If you click on this entry and hit the Options button you should see a dialog where you can set the number of days that must pass before an unaccessed file will be compressed. File compression is designed to save space on your hard drive. None of the files in this category will be deleted. File compression comes with a cost in performance. Should you need to access any of these files they will need to be decompressed before they are opened. For that reason, unless you are pressed for hard drive space, this is an option that you might want to leave unchecked. Another community answer from the Windows XP newsgroups

I find the behavior of the disk cleanup untility a little suspicious when it comes to compression of old files. WHENEVER I run this utility there is ALWAYS around 2 Gigabytes of old files to compress. I would expect that once I compressed these old files, that there would only be a few remaining "old" files to compress next time.I wonder if the disc cleanup utility only "thinks" these are files which are seldom used, and that within a day or two they somehow all get uncompressed again.