Speed up you laptop/pc by adding virtual ram ......

matttye

closed wrote: »

if there is any difference whatsoever, I doubt very much it has anything to do with readyboost

Surely readyboost is faster than using the paging file?

USB flash drives are faster than hard drives, so it stands to reason it should be faster.

closed

readyboost doesn't replace ram, or act as ram, the most common misconception is you can suddenly increase the memory in a machine by plugging in a cheap usb drive.

It's not the case, it's a disk cacheing mechanism, of dubious value, and as machines become increasingly well equipped with copious amounts of ram, fast drives or ssd's, it's usefulness is limited

likewise, pagefiles are probably rarely used on a modern machine with GB's of ram, so changing the default pagefile to something higher just adds to locked disk space, and possibly pagefile maintenance overheads. My pagefile is 16MB, and never changes, because it's never needed.

matttye

closed wrote: »

readyboost doesn't replace ram, or act as ram, the most common misconception is you can suddenly increase the memory in a machine by plugging in a cheap usb drive.

It's not the case, it's a disk cacheing mechanism, of dubious value, and as machines become increasingly well equipped with copious amounts of ram, fast drives or ssd's, it's usefulness is limited

likewise, pagefiles are probably rarely used on a modern machine with GB's of ram, so changeing the default pagefile to something higher just adds to locked disk space, and possibly pagefile maintenance overheads. My pagefile is 16MB, and never changes, because it's never needed.

No, but it caches the page file onto a flash drive which is faster to access than a hard drive - which explains why a system with low memory, like the one the OP said he has, will see a speed increase.

The OP has only 1GB of RAM so it's very likely his computer will be using the page file. Ready boost should make that faster.

Obviously more RAM would be the best way to go though.

closed

it cache's the page file onto the flash drive? If the op wanted, they could put the pagefile onto the flash drive.

some disk reads can be faster than flash.

the merit's of readyboost are dubious in any system, I tested it some time ago, made no noticeable difference at all, but looked good on Vista's how it's going to change your life marketing, which then gets repeated over and over again in publications and tech sites, and youtube video's, "hey guys, whatssuuup".

matttye

So maybe it's not readyboost but a side effect of having the page file on the flash drive that is speeding it up.

John_Gray

closed wrote: »

the merits of readyboost are dubious in any system, I tested it some time ago, made no noticeable difference at all, but looked good on Vista's how it's going to change your life marketing, which then gets repeated over and over again in publications and tech sites

"The merits of ReadyBoost are dubious in any system" - very true! What truth in the idea that it was invented by Microsoft in a desperate attempt to make underpowered PCs "Vista Ready"? (None, but there might have been! :cool:)

Have a look at the HowTo Geek's short article on the matter.
In summary, ReadyBoost probably won’t improve your computer’s performance much. If you have a very small amount of RAM (512 MB or so) and a very fast USB drive, you may see some increase in performance.

esuhl

The best way to speed up a Windows PC is stop all the programs that run on startup or in the background. When I use friends' PCs I'm always amazed at the incredible number of icons that appear in their system tray... very few of which are related to any useful activity.

The programs that run on startup will be listed under these registry keys:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

Vista & onwards seem to set the pagefile size fairly sensibly, and I've never noticed any difference in performance when using ReadyBoost.

cookie365

You don't need to faff about with the registry.

Either run services.msc from the start menu search box, or install an app to manage startup services like Winpatrol

matttye

cookie365 wrote: »

You don't need to faff about with the registry.

Either run services.msc from the start menu search box, or install an app to manage startup services like Winpatrol

Or 'msconfig' from the search box then go to the 'Startup' tab. This has the added benefit of showing startup programs from multiple locations.

sk240

Readyboost works really well on old netbooks with only 1gb of ram.
I installed a 4gb fast SD card into my old nebook and it made a huge difference to the system speed.
If using on an old macine with little ram it works well, just make sure teh USB device is a fast one