Boosting Ram ........ a tip I learned today

[crockers]

Ok I accept that many on here are far more IT literate than me ---but I was shown a tip today that I thought I ought to pass on incase anyone else didn't know it -- or be put right if I got it wrong...

Plug a USB memory stick in -- click on properties - and in the tabs is "speedboost" - this allows the USB memory to be used alongside the RAM to speed up the computer.

Seems a cheap and easy way......

 

[recycled]

Just increase your page file. it helps

 

[crockers]

Just increase your page file. it helps

Good idea............IF I knew what you meant.....lol...

 

[popuptoaster]

Its a designed in feature of Vista, wont work for those of us who refuse to use the nasty, slow, memory hungry OS of doom.

 

[Sp!ke]

I would suggest a far better approach would be to but some real RAM.

Trying to use a memory stick as system memory over a USB connection will likely slow the computer down rather than speed it up.

 

[recycled]

Just buy some more RAM

 

[columb]

Only in Vista, and only SpeedBoost ready.
Possibly will kill USB stick - as USB sticks have limited number of read/write operations.

Cheers
Chris

 

[whitenemesis]

Its a designed in feature of Vista, wont work for those of us who refuse to use the nasty, slow, memory hungry OS of doom.

Strange, I find Vista to be very swift, stable and a pleasure to use. Certainly better than my experiences with XP.

Each to their own I suppose

 

[coupe deville]

I;m running XP with 1.25 GB of ram and I speeded it up a fair bit by right clicking 'my computer' -click properties- click advanced- click performance settings- select 'adjust for best performance'
Desktop doesn't look as good but I prefer it to run faster

 

[popuptoaster]

I just wont use Vista, any game you look at that runs both xp and vista says it needs a gig more ram to run on vista, the game is exactly the same so why exactly does vista need to steal all that extra memory even though i dont actually need vista to be doing anything for me while im gaming?

even microsft realise they made a mistake and have brought its replacement forwards 2 years, makes no sense to me to change over just for the prettier graphics now that xp is finally pretty much sorted, not that i ever had any probs with it.

 

[Shude]

ReadyBoost just uses the memory stick as a pagefile backup, it does improve performance though.

 

[HughJarse]

even microsft realise they made a mistake and have brought its replacement forwards 2 years,

No Windows 7 is just a cosmetic update.

 

[Crazyjester900]

buy a Mac like me fit it with 8gb or RAM = No issue's with speed?

still got 4 slots free so can make it 16gb or

replace it all to make 32GB WOW super fast.

i'll never go back to windows!!!

 

[Spinal]

buy a Mac like me fit it with 8gb or RAM = No issue's with speed?

still got 4 slots free so can make it 16gb or

replace it all to make 32GB WOW super fast.

i'll never go back to windows!!!

Too much RAM can be a bad thing... if you increase your RAM too much, the OS will need to go through alot more indexes to retrieve anything in the ram - thus defeating the purpose...

Additionally, while Leopard is a 64bit OS, anything running a santa-rosa chipset doesn't support more than 4gb (from what I know it has a 32-bit FSB).

Finally... what are you going to do with all that ram if you don't have a game like crysis or farcry 2 to use it ?

M. (written on a MBP)

 

[popuptoaster]

No Windows 7 is just a cosmetic update.

Thats not what Bill Gates says.

That means that right now when you move from one pc to another, you've got to install apps on each one, do upgrades on each one. Moving information between them is very painful. We can use live services to know what you're interested in. So even if you drop by a [public] kiosk or somebody else's PC, we can bring down your home page, your files, your fonts, your favorites and those things. So that's kind of the user-centric thing that Live Services can enable. [Also,] in Vista, things got a lot better with [digital] ink and speech, but by the next release there will be a much bigger bet. Students won't need textbooks; they can just use these tablet devices. Parallelcomputing is pretty important for the next release. We'll make it so that a lot of the high-level graphics will be just built into the operating system. So we've got a pretty good outline.

and,

We're hard at work, I would say, on the next version, which we call Windows 7. I'm very excited about the work being done there. The ability to be lower power, take less memory, be more efficient, and have lots more connections up to the mobile phone, so those scenarios connect up well to make it a great platform for the best gaming that can be done, to connect up to the thing being done out on the Internet, so that, for example, if you have two personal computers, that your files automatically are synchronized between them, and so you don't have a lot of work to move that data back and forth.

 

[del320]

Can someone explain to me (like I'm a five year old) why 68.5GB has been used up out of my 455 GB hard drive on my shiny new computer?

As recorded elsewhere, my trusty Mesh PC packed in recently. Out of a 30GB HD , I still had 17GB left - and that takes account of 2.5GB of music and 1 GB of pictures.

I suspect a fair amount is reserved for the system restore - it still goes back to 16 October - when I bought it. Proof surely, that Vista uses a vast amount of resources.

I'm getting on fine with Vista but there is no denying there's a whole bunch of extraneous crap on it!

As far as using USB memory sticks, my system tells me my 2 GB sticks do not have the required performance characteristics for use in speeding up my system.

 

[andy_k]

system restore expands to a percentage of the available disk space, as does the swap/paging file.

You can grab some of that space back by manually setting the limits these two applications take up

 

[Spinal]

Can someone explain to me (like I'm a five year old) why 68.5GB has been used up out of my 455 GB hard drive on my shiny new computer?

As recorded elsewhere, my trusty Mesh PC packed in recently. Out of a 30GB HD , I still had 17GB left - and that takes account of 2.5GB of music and 1 GB of pictures.

I suspect a fair amount is reserved for the system restore - it still goes back to 16 October - when I bought it. Proof surely, that Vista uses a vast amount of resources.

I'm getting on fine with Vista but there is no denying there's a whole bunch of extraneous crap on it!

As far as using USB memory sticks, my system tells me my 2 GB sticks do not have the required performance characteristics for use in speeding up my system.

Lots of manufacturers will also put a hidden partition with the OS disks there - so that if you ever need to re-install the OS you don't need to look for disks..

M.

 

[popuptoaster]

disk manufacturers dont measure hard discs the same way PC's do none of em are ever as big as they are sposed to be.

Manufacturers measure a gig as being 1,000,000,000 bytes for conveniance, while computers count a gig as 1,073,741,824, so a "500" gig drive is really only 465gig.

It didnt really make much odds when 4 gig drives were considered large, but now the error stacks up to quite a lot of "lost" space.

Its a terminology problem really, see here if your interested.

http://compreviews.about.com/od/storage/a/ActualHDSizes.htm

 

[Dryce]

Too much RAM can be a bad thing... if you increase your RAM too much, the OS will need to go through alot more indexes to retrieve anything in the ram - thus defeating the purpose...

'the OS' ==> 'a badly designed OS'

I'm guessing you're talking about Windows?