File compression and Extracting compressed files ( Win. Vista & 7 )

File compression

What is file compression?

• File compression lets you make the size of files smaller.  This is useful when you need to save space on a disk or when you are sending a file as an email attachment and you want to keep the size of your attachments as small as possible.

Extracting compressed files

• Display the contents of a folder called Compressed files.  This folder contains a single file called Zipped file, as illustrated. 

• Select the file called Zipped file.  Double click on this file and the Zipped file will decompress and display 3 files which were compressed and stored within the Zip file.

Compressing files

• Select all the files within the File Types folder.  Right click over the selected files and from the popup menu displayed select the Send To command.  From the submenu, click on the Compressed (zipped) Folder command.   

• The selected files will be compressed into a single file.  You can type in a new name for the ZIP file, in this case called i.e. My backups.