... but then used DoubleSpace which someone mentioned here and it worked great on a Dell tablet ...
Just for the record seemingly (your first and only post to date):
http://reboot.pro/to...betas/?p=186552
you came here coming from the Doublespace homepage, at the time the thingy was experimental/beta, and you BTW never reported anything here about it working.
As I see it (but I may well be wrong) the "right" use of a Wimboot (or Doublespace or similar) and as well of NTFS compression is something that is mostly in the eye of the beholder, i.e. there is not a one-size-fits-all recommendation that can be given, on one of the stupid tablet devices with a fixed (and not replaceable) SSD it makes a lot of sense, on a "normal" laptop I would rather buy a SSD with a size fitting my needs (whatever they are) than use any of these solutions.
Bear with me, please .
You have a stupid tablet with a meager 32 Gb or 64 Gb non replaceable SSD and you have on it installed by the OEM a stupid 8/8.1 OS and additionally possibly a recovery partition (besides the "normal" WinRE).
The stupid OS + other stuff "from factory" takes (say) 20 Gb and considering that a "healthy" NTFS filesystem has a need for a 10-15% spare space, this means that if you can spare (say) 10 Gb out of the 20 you will have increased the available space for your files/content from (32*0.85)-20=7.2 Gb to 17.2 Gb, with a dramatic increase of 10/7.2=139%, but for the 64 Gb you would have (64*0.85)-20=34.4 and 10/34.4=29%.
The more the device is large and the more the amount you can save for the OS files by using Wimboot or similar becomes thinner, on a 120 Gb the increase is (120*0.85)-20=82 Gb and 10/82=12%.
For the rest of the files (i.e. your content) the difference between a compressed filesystem (plain or Doublespace or *whatever* ) and a "plain" non-compressed one depends on the actual nature of the content, if you want to store on the laptop (say) all the texts in Project Gutemberg, it is easy to double the capacity, if you plan to store almost only jpegs, movies and files downloaded from the internet as .pdf, .zip, .7z or .rar it is likely that the capacity will increase by 5% to 15%.
This means that the net effect on the 120 Gb could be anything between 40 Gb (50%*82) and 8 Gb (10%*82), most probably on average something like 25% to 30%.
So maybe your SSD that theoretically can hold 120-20-15 Gb=85 Gb of data, if compressed is likely to contain "virtually" (120-10-15)/0.75=127 Gb of data with an increase of 127/85=50% which is an exceptional result, but is it worth it (on a device on which you can actually replace the SSD)?
Wimboot may affect boot time (how much and if positively or negatively depends on the specific hardware involved, a relatively slow processor and a relatively fast storage subsystem will have an advantage with non-compressed drives, a relatively fast processor and a relatively slow storage subsystem may give a definite advantage with Wimboot).
In case of "disaster" ( NOT hardware) a non compressed filesystem usually allows much, much more chances to recover data.
In case of "disaster" (hardware) there is not much difference, you won't get your data back in any case.
A 240 Gb will allow you (with no hassle at all) 240*0.85 -20 = 184 Gb i.e. 184/127=45% more capacity when compared to the above compressed 120 GB
A 120 Gb is now on tigerdirect as an example *anything* between (say) 55 and 110 US$
A 240 Gb is *anything* between 85 and 180 US$.
You can draw the conclusions by yourself, the 120 (compressed) has a cost per Gb between 55/127=0.43 and 110/127=0.87, the 240 Gb "plain" between 85/184=0.46 and 0.96, which in practice means that the cost per Gb is exactly the same, but in one solution there is an increased risk for the data integrity, on the other there are none and there is not the hassle of Wimboot/Doublespace/NTFS compression, and overall we are talking of 30 to 70 US $, if you do it for the fun of it, it's more than OK, if you value the time needed to research for the "right" solution, for the experimenting, for implementing it (and without any actual guarantee to reach the available size calculated) the total is obviously negative.
Of course sizes/occupation of the OS+ pre-installed OEM crap, actual level of compression achievable, prices of the hardware, etc. are only indicative, feel free to replace them with more accurate values from your experience or from other sources but the "template" for the cost/benefits evaluation should be accurate enough.
Wonko