ready boost with vista and usb drive

[Soundguy]

anyone got the skinny on this?

now that I got a vista PC.. I just noticed when I stick a usb drive in, one of the options is to 'increase speed with ready-boost '

so.. what does it actually do?

add usb drive to ram?

use usb drive as cache?

etc?

are all the usb drives on the market pretty much useable this way?

are there certain features that won't get sped up etc?

for instance.. if aI'm playing a video game. or doing a spread sheet.. can I assume one might get more 'noticed' boost than the other.. ( I assume the spread sheet won't be taxing hte computer very much.. etc.. .. thus no boost noticed.. ) etc?

thanks

if it's worth while.. seeings as how usb drives in the 2g-4g range can be had for under 20$.. might be ok to have a dedicated drive just for performance?

soundguy

[jwstewar]

I played with this for awhile. If you are short on RAM in can help, but if you have a new machine with a couple gig of RAM, I don't think you'll see any benefit.

From what I gather it kind of acts like your RAM swap on your hard drive, but in theory the flash drives are supposed to quicker than your hard drive. I'll say it helped some, but it wasn't a substitute for true RAM. With my laptop I also had it corrupt a couple of flash drives so that they weren't usable. Don't know if it were the flash drive or Vista itself did it. The laptop only had a gig of RAM, so I finally gave up and jumped it to 2 gig and it has been screaming since.

Any of the flash drives can do it, but some of the cheaper ones (Micro Center generic and the like) aren't as quick as some of the other "brand" names. I've found the same to be true with SD cards and such as well.

[MossRoad]

Here's a pretty good write up on it. It talks to the guy that is responsible for ready boost.

Tom Archer's Blog : ReadyBoost Q&A

In a nutshell, you are creating a swap or page file on your flash drive in addition to the swap or page file on your hard drive. Windows lies to programs and tells them they have much more memory available to them than the machine actually has physical memory. It uses a page file on the hard drive to write and read bits of information to and from the physical memory if it cannot keep all of the information in the physical memory. Kind of like a human writing things down when they have too much to remember. Take it out of the brain (memory) and put it on paper(page file). Then, when you need to remember it put it back in the memory and erase the paper.

The problem is Windows is such a pig that it can't swap information in and out of the page file on a hard drive very fast. The ready boost puts a page file cache on a USB drive and accesses that faster than it can on the hard drive. From what the guy is saying... about 10x faster.

[Soundguy]

Ok.. I'm familiar with windows swap files.. so.. the ready boost is just a faster swap file.

hmm.. might try it.. might not.. my machine has 4 gigs ram.. not sure if it is hitting the swap file heavy or not as it is.....

anyone have a size suggestion? 2g? 4g? ??g

soundguy

[Soundguy]

good read... guess I'm gonna try a 4g usb drive and see what I get out of it.... they are dirt cheap now anyway..

soundguy

[BarryinMN]

I put a 8gig SD card in my 2 gig dual core notebook. Vista automatically found it and asked to set it up with 4 gig (max) swap file. I don't use it very much but it seems to work faster on Google Earth directX 10 video. I leave the SD in it as the machine is Wi-Fi backup to my primary use desktop.

I tried a Microcenter 2gig SD card I use em in a digital camera it did not say anything about ready boost - must be too slow.

[Steve C]

Originally Posted by Soundguy

anyone got the skinny on this?

now that I got a vista PC.. I just noticed when I stick a usb drive in, one of the options is to 'increase speed with ready-boost '

so.. what does it actually do?

add usb drive to ram?

use usb drive as cache?

etc?

are all the usb drives on the market pretty much useable this way?

are there certain features that won't get sped up etc?



for instance.. if aI'm playing a video game. or doing a spread sheet.. can I assume one might get more 'noticed' boost than the other.. ( I assume the spread sheet won't be taxing hte computer very much.. etc.. .. thus no boost noticed.. ) etc?

thanks

if it's worth while.. seeings as how usb drives in the 2g-4g range can be had for under 20$.. might be ok to have a dedicated drive just for performance?

soundguy

I dunno but i just hate vista. It has a mind of its own. I am an old D.O.S. guy

[Soundguy]

Same here.. dos and to some extent.. cpm.. or even basic.. heck.. any CLI vs gui was what I was used to for years... this hands off stuff is odd.. I rather enjoyed being an ironmonger..

soundguy

[MossRoad]

Originally Posted by Soundguy

Same here.. dos and to some extent.. cpm.. or even basic.. heck.. any CLI vs gui was what I was used to for years... this hands off stuff is odd.. I rather enjoyed being an ironmonger..

soundguy

The command line is the best for learning how things work. However, most users do not want to know how things work. They just want them to work. They want to come in, turn a machine on, not wait for it to boot up and just start working. Look at a PDA. You turn it on and it is working in seconds. Heck, cell phones are starting to take too long to boot up. However, most folks never turn them off. I know I rarely turn mine off. It has probably been off two or three times in the past year.

The best thing that ever happened to DOS was Windows. They had to make these big honkin' processors just to run the GUIs. Running DOS on big processors was great. Really fast, only not multi-tasking. We still have 4 machines that boot up in Windows 3.11 then open a DOS program and pull in AP wire stories all day long. Maybe 12,000 stories a day. The DOS program takes in the serial data from 4 different feeds, processes it and sends it on to our database. These 4 machines have been running 247/365 for well over 15 years! The hard drives keep croaking every 3-4 years, but that is the only problem. Rock solid program and performance.

Then step up to Win95. What a piece of junk. Remember the bug where the machine hangs after 49 days? No one knew how that bug was ever found because no one ever had a Win95 machine that would stay up a few days, let alone 49!

Ahh, the good old days.

[Soundguy]

the reason most pda's turn on instantly is that they never turn off.. the screen is shut down, and the rest of the machine hibernates.. it's all pseudo-static ram anyway. Let the battery completely die then turn it back on and then see the 'real' bootup process that can take near a minute. I have a z22 palm and the wife an E2.. .. neat organizers.. i keep my work schedules on mine.

I loved cli.. turn on machine.. take a few seconds for config sys and autoexec to run.. then hop in whatever program you needed and go.

used to use doubledos and then desqview as a multitasker.. desqview was awesome.. way better task management and smoother running.. way better than any of the win 3.x / workgroups components. win95 may have actually surpassed desqview.. but then.. it was an old dead software stuck with limited memory support (ems/xms) and probably the fastest thing out at that time might have been a 486 overdrive processor under 100mhz..

soundguy

soundguy