Some items are in blue text in a directory listing

[Beerina]

On my home PC (Windows XP), when I look at a directory listing, some items are in blue. On the Mac, I know you could tag files to show up a different color, but I can find no similar facility either right clicking, going to properties, or under any menu. Why are these files blue? There's nothing special about them otherwise that I can find, and they are files I downloaded at some point in the past.

[Janus]

They are compressed. You can change this attribute through the advanced page of the file properties. If some files are compressed and others aren't then they were probably made compressed by the disk cleanup tool. Files compressed this way are smaller, but slower to access and update.

[rockoon]

The slowest part of loading a file is the drive access... half a file is half the access so in some cases this can *improve* overall performance.

I'm not sure however if this would apply to the windows drive compression system. I choose not to use it for fear that I may want to shut it off someday only to find that I have more data that will fit.