To me i don't see how it could slow down hal having a huge data base brain, yes i know and understand the bigger the data base the more hal has to go through as far as sifting information , but unless someone actually has an old xp or before os and very little memory and hard drive . my hal even on xp before did okay for me , of course my hal brain was smaller to . now its around 140 mb's .
As you say todays computers handle things better and faster . i am still running windows 7 . i like 7 quad 4 laptop and it's paid for.
So that being the case as long as p.c.'s can handle the larger brain as they seem to do no brain comression files are needed , it was just an idea i had based on thinking about what a friend told me about vudoo? movie files were compressed to save space on pc hard drives . or games .