Windows Speed Boost.

[watforddude]

Apparantly you can add a memory stick and use a certain amount of the memory on the stick and use it to speed up your system, would this only be useful for very low end system ( compeard to everyone else on here mine is) or would it make a considerable difference to the speed of my system?

[jim]

Only if you haven't got enough RAM is it any use.

The whole point is that it replaces the pagefile to improve speed - if you've got adequate RAM, it'll make no difference at all. 2GB is ample, I wouldn't bother.

[watforddude]

Ok thanks Just wanted to know if it would make any improvment!

[nibbler]

Apart from the case that pc is far from the worst on hexus

[scaryjim]

Apart from the case that pc is far from the worst on hexus

"Worst PC on Hexus" sounds like a challenge to me: I could put my current "office" PC in mine (Duron 700, 512MB PC133, probably PC Chips mobo, 40GB IDE HDD, AOpen H360B (yup, the case is pretty much the best part ) ) or my new build (Celeron D 345, Biostar P4M900-M4, 1GB DDR2-533)...

Back on topic: the idea behind SpeedBoost is that randomly accessing a USB2.0 memory stick should be faster than accessing a mechanical hard drive, so having your pagefile on a USB stick should be faster than on a mechanical drive. Looking back at 4k random reads from some recent Hexus USB storage reviews a USB flash drive is significantly faster than a mechnical HDD, so there is some benchmark support for that assumption.

With 2GB RAM, it's all going to be about how many memory hungry programmes you run. I'm using a relatively new (i.e. clean) Win XP install at the minute with ~ 10 tabs open in Chrome and Thunderbird running with 2 inboxes open, my AV is Sophos which is fairly memory light, and my VM Usgae is already up to 800MB, so if you have a lot of windows & tabs open at once you might find you are using your pagefile more often then you suspect.And of course, that's assuming that Windows only swaps memory out to pagefile when the physical memory is full, which may or may not be an accurate assumption... In those circumstances, while it wouldn't necessarily make your computer faster, you might find it a bit more responsive when switching between tabs and applications.

[mr-zeeman]

i used readyboost didnt do anything i have got 4gb in my system tho.

[watforddude]

"Worst PC on Hexus" sounds like a challenge to me: I could put my current "office" PC in mine (Duron 700, 512MB PC133, probably PC Chips mobo, 40GB IDE HDD, AOpen H360B (yup, the case is pretty much the best part ) ) or my new build (Celeron D 345, Biostar P4M900-M4, 1GB DDR2-533)...

Back on topic: the idea behind SpeedBoost is that randomly accessing a USB2.0 memory stick should be faster than accessing a mechanical hard drive, so having your pagefile on a USB stick should be faster than on a mechanical drive. Looking back at 4k random reads from some recent Hexus USB storage reviews a USB flash drive is significantly faster than a mechnical HDD, so there is some benchmark support for that assumption.

With 2GB RAM, it's all going to be about how many memory hungry programmes you run. I'm using a relatively new (i.e. clean) Win XP install at the minute with ~ 10 tabs open in Chrome and Thunderbird running with 2 inboxes open, my AV is Sophos which is fairly memory light, and my VM Usgae is already up to 800MB, so if you have a lot of windows & tabs open at once you might find you are using your pagefile more often then you suspect.And of course, that's assuming that Windows only swaps memory out to pagefile when the physical memory is full, which may or may not be an accurate assumption... In those circumstances, while it wouldn't necessarily make your computer faster, you might find it a bit more responsive when switching between tabs and applications.

Yeah but look at your main system on your 'My System', this is my one and only system and I'm stuck with it

[Pob255]

I haven't found sophos to be that memory light, I'll have to double check but I seem to remember it uses around 90meg, it is relatively thread&cpu time light.
You can reduce the impact by turning off some of the functions but we found out to our cost the weaker level of protection that gives.

readyboost can improve performance if you've got a slower hard drive and less than 1gb of memory.
Although there was an idea used on netbooks which maybe better, that was fit a 2gb memory stick, then set up about 800mb as a ram drive and put the swap file on that.

[scaryjim]

Yeah but look at your main system on your 'My System', this is my one and only system and I'm stuck with it

hmmm, good point well made sir

I haven't found sophos to be that memory light, I'll have to double check but I seem to remember it uses around 90meg

My sophos services are currently running ~ 80MB total, which I didn't think was too bad, but you need to take into account that most of the machines I support at work are currently running MacAfee... I think MSE is lighter still though - iirc that only takes about 65MB?

[Pob255]

On my pc AVG is using about 65mb but it is over 7 exe's

And yes I'd take sophos over Macafee or norton

[Zak33]

on Sair's netbook (Vista Business) with 1 gig in it, putting a 1gig USB drive in and choosing "Yes" to Speed Boost makes a fairly good difference if you've got a lot to do on it, such as a few spread sheets, plus surfing, and browsing etc all at once.. but mainly it would be bette to have more CPU power 90% of the time

[scaryjim]

... yes I'd take sophos over Macafee ...

I've managed to migrate about 4 of my colleagues over so far - I'm working on the rest