OT: NTFS File Compression

[Tom C]

Sorry for the OT post.  I get kind of lazy and am tending to keep 40 - 50Gb 
of photos on my laptop hard drive.  They get backed up but I don't always 
have access to my external hard drive, so I keep them for when I want to 
work on them.

Any thoughts on using NTFS compression/compaction to save hard drive space 
for these folders?  I looked for performance degradation statistics online 
but didn't find much.

I'm running XP Professional with a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 and 512Mb of RAM.

Thanks.

Tom C.