Is readyboost any use at all on a fairly quick PC?

[DanceswithUnix]

Wife has been complaining that if she has to boot her PC up over breakfast, then by the time she is into the web browser her breakfast is finished.

I disabled Steam from auto starting which got loads of time back, and found a 10 second pointless delay in the BIOS (AsusGate I think it was called, never used it probably never will).

Down to about a minute and a half from power button to browser, so I grabbed an 8GB USB3 flash drive that says it can do 100MB/sec read speed 55MB/sec write, formatted it for NTFS, and told Windows to use all of it for readyboost. So far I can't feel any difference at all.

PC is a 3.4GHz Phenom II quad core with 4GB of RAM and a new WD Black hard drive. It used to have an SSD, but that failed after about 6 months so she doesn't want another one.

Any suggestions? Other than chew more slowly when having breakfast

[Splash]

Not really, I found Readyboost useful back when I first installed Vista (low RAM for the OS) and it made a difference but it was nowhere near the boost I got from more RAM.

Anything else in MSConfig you can clear out? That said... isn't AsusGate one of those "instant boot into a basic OS with a web browser" kinda things that might well serve best for what she's looking at (if she's just looking for a browser)?

[Phage]

No.
Used to make a difference on my old P4 at work a few years ago.

[chuckskull]

Best solution would probably be using sleep rather than shutdown. Even slower computers will wake in no time.

[Butuz]

Hmm. I recons you should get an SSD again - but this time not an OCZ one!

Butuz

[AETAaAS]

How fast does your wife eat breakfast? On one of my older machines running Vista booting from a WD Green drive, I don't think I could have finished breakfast before it booted.

Agree with Butuz, get something like a Samsung 840, and tell your wife that if it fails, someone you know over the internet will go to his local Tesco, find the promoter for Samsung products (saw one last time in a Tesco Extra explaining the tablets) and slap them on the butt with nary a word of explanation and then run out of the store singing Katy Perry's Firework.

That or an OS switch to something like Lubuntu or Windows 8? Or even a Chromebook for Christmas.

[DanceswithUnix]

Thanks guys.

Steam was pulling the boot time up to around three minutes, so I guess breakfast was over in about 4

The SSD was actually a Corsair Force GT one. I think it just didn't like the chipset in her PC, plugged it into a trinity/FM2 machine and it sprang back into life, updated the firmware on it, and it seems OK now. She utterly won't have it back though, so I have other plans for that.

She has an OCZ SSD in her laptop, that works fine. Ho hum.

Oh, and it does usually sleep. But ever so often, being Windows, it fails to recover from sleep and does a full reboot. As for Lubuntu, if Steam for Linux takes off that could be a possibility, but for now she is in the middle of a Civ 5 game so needs Windows.

Hmm, laptop has an SSD, will go time that booting now...

[Kumagoro]

Last time I looked at ready boost it is not persistent so no good for boot times.

I tried fancy cache or whatever it's called now and that didn't feel any different even with delayed writes on. Boot or in windows generally that was.

Only an SSD it's going to make any difference. A few do around 30MBps now for 4k read. The evo has some magic boost or similar which pushes the benchmarks high but I am not sure if it's only in benchmarks. I think I saw something like 80MBps for 4k.

[DanceswithUnix]

My memory from all the fanfare when Readyboost came out was that it supposedly helped boot times, but I guess that is only on a ram starved machine.

The laptop was 55s to the desktop from cold. Not bad, but only half a minute down from her desktop machine which at ~4 mins for 2 slices of toast is only a quarter of a slice so not a deal breaker

Booting my Linux box from cold this morning was 1m40s to the desktop. Given that involves starting up web servers, email servers and all the other stuff you get a dev machine that doesn't seem bad for a hard drive (WD Blue). Oh, it was about 25s just to get out of the bios on this box so the Linux bit was just over a minute.

I think I'm getting carried away with this

[TheAnimus]

Install windows 8.1. Boots a hell of a load faster.

I think your confusing readyboost with the intel bootfaster thing that also had a similar name. Ready boost is just using some flash memory for swap, so is useful if you've not got a lot of RAM.

[chuckskull]

Forgot how tetchy sleep could get, how about wake/boot on alarm? Not seen a BIOS in years that couldn't do it. Set it 5 minutes before you get up and bobs your mothers brother. Pretty reliable too

[DanceswithUnix]

Install windows 8.1. Boots a hell of a load faster.

I think your confusing readyboost with the intel bootfaster thing that also had a similar name. Ready boost is just using some flash memory for swap, so is useful if you've not got a lot of RAM.

Is WIn 8 really that fast then?

I even have a spare Windows 8 license from when they were cheap, but I don't think she will go for that if only for the faff of having to re-install stuff again not long after the SSD played up and forced her to do that (which wasn't long after a hard drive died)...

Forgot how tetchy sleep could get, how about wake/boot on alarm? Not seen a BIOS in years that couldn't do it. Set it 5 minutes before you get up and bobs your mothers brother. Pretty reliable too

Interesting thought, though I would have to time it for 5 mins before she sits in front of the machine, wouldn't want it going back to sleep again before she got to it

[chuckskull]

Just lengthen the timer on sleep in the power options.

[TheAnimus]

Is WIn 8 really that fast then?

Considerably faster and 8.1 is even more so.

As a test I had a 18 month old Series 9 samsung, cold boot to desktop faster than a brand new mac air running latest OSX.

[Zak33]

get up 90 seconds before her every morning and boot it up for her before she makes it into the kitchen

and remind her of that love, devotion and effort....every night as you crawl into bed.......

[DanceswithUnix]

Just lengthen the timer on sleep in the power options.

Have you seen the price of electricity?

OK, my father was northern and some things are handed down

Even my daughter's Trinity based PC has a fairly short sleep timer on it and that thing sips, but with 4 PCs in the room that is a lot of power/heat if you leave them on for no good reason.

Considerably faster and 8.1 is even more so.

As a test I had a 18 month old Series 9 samsung, cold boot to desktop faster than a brand new mac air running latest OSX.

Sorry that doesn't mean much. Last Apple I used in anger was an Apple IIe, twin floppy drives and everything. Had that puppy playing 3 part harmony music, though it sounded pants compared to the Dragon

get up 90 seconds before her every morning and boot it up for her before she makes it into the kitchen

and remind her of that love, devotion and effort....every night as you crawl into bed.......

lol, well I did hit the space bar as I walked past her PC this morning. Reminding her of such activities might just remind her of the horrors of Windows before bed, possibly better to just enjoy the mortning quiet of her not shouting to the PC to get ******* started