CONFIGURE SYNCHRONIZATION MANAGER

10-79Chapter Summary

What do you suspect is the problem? What would you do to help Jonas?

Chapter Summary

Windows XP Professional supports two types of disk storage: basic disks and

dynamic disks. All disks are basic disks by default, but you can upgrade the basic

disks to dynamic disks with no loss of data. You can also downgrade a dynamic disk

to a basic disk, but all data on the disk is lost. Windows XP Professional provides the

Disk Management utility to configure, manage, and monitor hard disks and volumes.

You can also manage disks from the command line by using the Diskpart command.

Windows XP Professional provides two types of compression: Compressed Fold-

ers and NTFS compression. A compressed folder appears in Windows Explorer as

an icon of a zipper across a folder. NTFS compression is a function of the NTFS file

system that allows you to compress files, folders, or an entire volume.

Use Windows XP Professional disk quotas to allocate disk space usage to users.

Windows XP Professional disk quotas track and control disk usage on a per-user,

per-volume basis. You can set disk quotas, quota thresholds, and quota limits for

all users and for individual users. You can apply disk quotas only to Windows XP

Professional NTFS volumes.

EFS allows users to encrypt files and folder on an NTFS volume by using a strong

public key–based cryptographic scheme that encrypts all files in a folder. You can-

not apply both compression and encryption to a file or folder at the same time.

Files remain encrypted if you move or rename them, or if you back them up.

Windows XP Professional provides three utilities for maintaining disks:

Windows XP Professional saves files and folders in the first available space on

a hard disk and not necessarily in an area of contiguous space, which can lead

to file and folder fragmentation. Disk Defragmenter, a Windows XP Profes-

sional system tool, locates fragmented files and folders and defragments them,

enabling your system to access and save files and folders more efficiently.

Check Disk attempts to repair file system errors, locate bad sectors, and

recover readable information from those bad sectors.

Disk Cleanup frees up disk space by locating temporary files, Internet cache

files, and unnecessary programs that you can safely delete.

The Offline Files feature allows Windows to create a temporary copy of shared

files on the network so that you can use them when you are disconnected from

the network. Before you can use offline files, you must use the Folders Options

selection on the Tools menu of Windows Explorer to enable the feature. After

enabling Offline Files, you can use My Network Places to make any network

accessible folder for which offline caching is enabled available offline.

Exam Highlights

Before taking the exam, review the key points and terms that are presented in this

chapter. You need to know this information.

Key Points

Windows XP Professional does not support fault-tolerant disk configurations.

Spanned volumes simply allow you to use different amounts of disk space from

multiple hard disks in a single volume. Striped volumes allow you use an identical

amount of disk space from multiple hard disks. The advantage of using striped

volumes is that Windows can write information to the disk more quickly.

When you convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk, data on the disk is preserved.

When you revert a dynamic disk to a basic disk, data on the disk is lost.

Compressed files cannot be encrypted, and encrypted files cannot be compressed

with NTFS compression.

NTFS allocates disk space based on uncompressed file size. If you copy a com-

pressed file to an NTFS volume with enough space for the compressed file, but

not enough space for the uncompressed file, you might get an error message that

states that there is not enough disk space for the file, and the file will not be cop-

ied to the volume.

Key Terms

basic disk A physical disk that can be accessed locally by MS-DOS and all Windows-

based operating systems. Basic disks can contain up to four primary partitions or

three primary partitions and an extended partition with multiple logical drives. If you

want to create partitions that span multiple disks, you must first convert the basic disk

to a dynamic disk using Disk Management or the Diskpart.exe command-line utility.

Note that whether a disk is basic or dynamic has no bearing on whether computers

running other operating systems can connect to shared folders on the disk.