I've been tasked with compacting some of the personal geodatabases (MDB files) in our office every few weeks. These reside on a couple of separate file servers.
I have been using ArcCatalog to do this task, but it is very slow to launch, and switching from directory to directory also causes the title bar to display "Not Responding" for a while. All in all, the process is painfully slooooow...
However, I remember performing some compact tests on these files using Microsoft Access several months ago, and it didn't have these same problems. And the databases seemed to behave normally afterwards. However, I decided to adopt ArcCatalog because I assumed that it might be better suited to compacting these special kind of MDB files.
Was this a correct assumption? Does it matter whether I use ArcCatalog vs. Microsoft Access when I want to compact my geodatabases? Is the compact process any different between the two?