New PC Studio: reclaim your disk space!

[GenerationNoise]

Over the last 2 years I've regularly used NPS to make a copy of all the texts on my phone (for nostalgic reasons I guess), and one thing has always eluded me: text messages are at most somewhere near 140 bytes in size, but the data file created by NPS had grown to over 30MB for a mere 3000 text messages!

What I did is I opened the guest.dat file (located at "C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\Samsung\New PC Studio" on Windows 7) in a hex editor and to my dismay I discovered that the file was filled with over 24 billion occurrences of "0" (which is basically dummy data or something, I don't know).
Another thing I noticed is that Samsung uses a Microsoft Jet database filesystem, and luckily for us there exists a tool to compact these databases.

First way to free disk space

You can download the compacting tool directly from Microsoft's servers: http://download.microsoft.com/download/access2000/utility/1.0/win98me/en-us/jetcu40.exe
I've taken the liberty to copy paste the instructions from the official readme. After extracting jetcu40.exe:

• Double-click JetComp.exe.
• In the Database to Compact From (Source) box, type the path and name of the database that you want to compact. (in our case: C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\Samsung\New PC Studio\guest.dat)
• In the Database to Compact Into (Destination) box, type the path and name of the new compacted database that you want to create. (name it guest2.dat, same folder)
• Under Additional Compact Options, set the appropriate options. (default settings worked for me)
• Click Compact.

After doing that, you will end up with a new file that is much smaller in size. Delete the original
guest.dat file and replace it with the new guest.dat file. If all went right, you've freed up a couple of megabytes while everything works just as before.

Second way to free up disk space
In the same folder where guest.dat is located, I also found a bunch of other large files, numbered from 00000001.dat to 00000006.dat. Together, they were just above 90MB in size.
I've ran a couple of tests with a file monitoring tool and they don't seem to be accessed at all. They just sit there, taking up your disk space. I deleted them and noticed no side-effects whatsoever. I believe it's safe to delete these files.

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These 2 steps gave me back 120MB that were apparently not used by NPS. If I come across more ways to free disk space, I'll include them in this post.