Windows 7 - improved Readyboost

[Georgy291]

surely if your mobo doesnt suport up to 4gig of ram. rather than comeing up with crafty solutions like this, which evidentaly everyone said they dont work would be easier just to buy a cheap 4 slot mobo?

just looking at scan look at something am2+ and 4 slots...not very expensive at all

Oh and btw i did notcie a slight improvement when playing crysis. I used to have 1gig of ram and randomly stuck my 8gig usb stick in and set the readyboost to max, i think it looked slightly smoother

[kalniel]

surely if your mobo doesnt suport up to 4gig of ram. rather than comeing up with crafty solutions like this, which evidentaly everyone said they dont work would be easier just to buy a cheap 4 slot mobo?

Georgy, are you serious comparing spending £5 on a USB stick and just sticking it into the front of your computer with spending £80 on a new motherboard, £80 on a new OEM OS, rebuilding your computer from scratch and reinstalling everything, and then concluding that readyboost is the harder/more expensive option?

[shaithis]

Still, netbooks and the occasional oddball chipset/motherboard, do not a majority make

[darkghost]

You're wrong. The G31 chipset, for example, cannot use more than 4GB no matter what the O/S is.

In practice it can address between 3 and 3.5GB, depending on the size of GFX card memory and, to a lesser extent other installed hardware .

I have installed the 64-bit Win7 RTM and I get 3.1GB usable with 4GB DDR2.

I reinstalled the 32-bit version for now as it has slightly better compatibility for gaming (I think).

If the majority of people out there are running P31, G31 boards then I'm happy to admit I'm wrong. In reality, I think "most" people buy the best board they can realistically afford for the purpose they need, rather than the cheapest one they can find that will struggle to do what they want.

These P31 boards were designed for cheap lightweight systems - so why people are trying to run a 64-bit OS on them I've no idea. Using a Readyboost compatible USB stick may offer some improvement in these situations, but frankly I really can't see why the majority of people running a restricted motherboard want (or expect) to use high end applications requiring a 64-bit OS and lots of RAM.

For the small number of cases where Readyboost makes a difference, Microsoft should have invested their efforts elsewhere.
I for one was hoping that with Windows 7 there would be support to install different parts of the OS (eg. Programs, Windows update folder, etc) onto different drives to make the most of SSDs and RAM and HD drives. It's not difficult and LINUX has been able to do this for years.

[rushholme]

I for one was hoping that with Windows 7 there would be support to install different parts of the OS (eg. Programs, Windows update folder, etc) onto different drives to make the most of SSDs and RAM and HD drives. It's not difficult and LINUX has been able to do this for years.

That would have been good!

[watercooled]

surely if your mobo doesnt suport up to 4gig of ram. rather than comeing up with crafty solutions like this, which evidentaly everyone said they dont work would be easier just to buy a cheap 4 slot mobo?

just looking at scan look at something am2+ and 4 slots...not very expensive at all

Oh and btw i did notcie a slight improvement when playing crysis. I used to have 1gig of ram and randomly stuck my 8gig usb stick in and set the readyboost to max, i think it looked slightly smoother

I'd say probably co-incidence or it just looked better because you expected it to - games generally cache what they need in main RAM and load stuff from the HDD well in advance or on a load screen. I could see readyboost possibly making a difference in load times but you have 6GB of RAM and no game I know of uses anywhere near that much RAM.

It's not really a poorman's upgrade because as mentioned a half decent flash drive with a high enough capacity will cost a fair bit so you might as well buy some proper RAM. If you have an older system that is swapping to the HDD a lot (I have the PF on a second drive on a computer and it spins down after a bit because it's just not used really) and upgrading memory isn't an option and if you have a flash drive lying round then it's worth a shot. Really though if you have a system that can't support 2GB RAM it's probably an XP system which copes fine with that much. 2GB or more though and the effect of Readyboost is negligible in most cases.

[TheAnimus]

I think i'm going to have to try this out on my portable laptop, been sony they refuse to admit the memory stick duo is a pointless format, and as a result I never use that reader really.

So now if only i could buy a memory card for it that didn't cost the earth and had good performance characteristics it could be very helpful as it only supports 2 gig o ram.

[watercooled]

One thing with that though some card readers only support using one card at a time so make sure to check before buying one if you plan to leave it in.

[Syllopsium]

I'd be very careful about this, as some of the ReadyBoost capable flash drives do not run at a consistent speed. I tried it with Vista SP1 x64 when I was running with 4GB a while back.

Windows identified the flash drive as valid and seemed to work, but a few weeks on after re-purposing the flash drive to transfer data the copying of data started fine but then slowed to a crawl.

In theory, it's quite a good idea. In practice I think you might run into problems.

I just whacked in another 4GB, but obviously not all chipsets support >4GB.

For what it's worth, I was trying with a Kingston 2GB readyboost stick. Obviously I wouldn't recommend it..

PK

[rushholme]

When proper reviews of 7 come out we'll see if Readyboost makes any difference.