Hello,
Firstly, let me get something off my chest:
The registration process for this forum is a shambles. The password requirements are too high, the CAPTCHA to register is like no other I have ever seen (the question requires you to trawl the ZipMagic website for a piece of marketing fluff) and the forgotten password link requires both the username and email address with no recourse for those who have only one.
Terrible start. But anyway.
I stumbled upon this software while Goodling for WIMBoot information. It appears to have been posted/advertised in 90% of discussions about WIMBoot. I used to have a 32GB tablet where Windows squeezed into something silly like 4GB of space through WIMBoot technology. As we know, WIMBoot is shit because it bloats over time. So I find ZIPMagic, which advertises that it can WIMBoot your existing Windows install and maintain it properly.
Cool! Great! Now that I've run it in trial, Windows is lying about my disk capacity. It says 278GB. It's a 256GB SSD. I have tried to reverse the WIMBoot process, however cannot find any clear option to do so (I struggled to find the WIMBoot option in the first place). The WIMBoot setup that ZIPMagic uses appears entirely different from the Windows 8.1 effort, since I now have a 70GB .wim file on C:, C:\Windows is 10GB on disk whilst 20GB in reality.
All I wanted was the same WIMBoot that Windows 8.1 had, now I have something that is different, poorly explained with seemingly no option to reverse it. The program offers 4 different grades of compression... with no details on what each one is other than a weird female voice saying 'maximum compression'. Seriously, this software feels like a game, which isn't good.
So, yeah... questions:
1) Can I uncompress the WIMBoot into what it was before?
2) Can I achieve the same WIMBoot structure that Windows 8.1 had? Accurately reporting disk capacity and compressing via LZX the Windows directory into another partition?
3) What actually happens with each grade of compression in this software? LZX? Something else?
I'm considering a purchase to unlock those higher levels of compression, but I'd actually like some real (not marketing fluff) to know what they do, and if it can be reversed. I do not like poorly explained voodoo.