Forgot to compress now VM is twice the size

Hi

When I installed my Windows XP VM along with all the programs I needed the VM was around 8gb. I haven't done any snapshots or saved any data to the VM (I save everything onto the Mac drive). I forgot to compress a couple of times and now the VM is 20.4 GB. It won't compress to below that now so there's a lot of bloat in the VM. Is there any way to remove the bloat and get the size back to under 10gb?

Also, does Parallels have an auto compress? When i first started using it I didn't know about needing to compress the VM and it grew to over 100gb! Ended up re-installing...

Thanks
Russell

 

Autocompress in Parallels is in Configure --> Options --> Optimisation --> Free space.

I suggest you to use WIndows Defragmenter in order to allocate al the data and get rid of unused space. Defragment the disk and try to run compression again

 

Thanks very much. I'll give this a go tonight.

 

I defragmented and then ran Windows' disk clean-up utility and deleted 9.5gb of temp data. I ran Parallels' compressor and the VM size reduced to 12.5gb.

When I looked in the 'optimization' options 'Automatically compress' was already ticked so does that mean it's not working?

 

It is working, but obviously i has a lot of temp data - which Parallels cannot remove for you. It can compress only if you have some free space inside VM