Microsoft Plus! Utilities for Disk Management

Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95 provides the following additional capabilities for managing a computer running Windows 95:

• Enhancements to DriveSpace for higher compression ratios, support for creating compressed drives that are 2 GB in size, and compression information as part of drive and folder properties. To achieve greater performance and compression benefits, the Microsoft Plus! compression manager provides a new CVF format (DriveSpace 3).
• Compression Agent, a recompression utility that can run when your computer is idle to maximize the compression of files. With Compression Agent, the whole drive or designated files can be compressed when no other work is being done on the computer, rather than compressing files as they are saved during a work session. Compression Agent also allows you to designate different compression methods for different files and offers the UltraPack encoding format, a new method for achieving maximum compression.
• System Agent, a general-purpose scheduling program that comes preconfigured to maintain the computer's hard disks by running programs such as ScanDisk or Compression Agent at scheduled times. You can also use System Agent to schedule programs to run at specified intervals.

Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95 also includes features such as font smoothing, animated cursors, a set of themes for personalizing your computer, and more. For information about the dial-up networking server provided with Microsoft Plus!, see Chapter 28, "Dial-Up Networking and Mobile Computing."

Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95 is available as a retail product. Some computer equipment manufacturers might also include these utilities as part of the software provided with the computer. If these utilities were not provided on your computer, contact your software vendor about obtaining this product.

The following sections present some technical details about these additional disk management utilities. For information about installing, configuring, and using the utilities, see the Microsoft Plus! documentation (Introducing Microsoft Plus!) and online Help for each program.