Ready Boost (Vista and Win7)

[Baddcog]

I was just checking out my new partitions, Win7 made a 100MB system partition on my main HD. In properties it had a readyboost tab.

 

I don't recal if I had ever heard anything about it, Vista ate my flash drive the first time I used it. Luckily when I tested Kubuntu I restored it to working condition. SO if I had heard about it I forgot just as quickly.

 

Anyway, curious as to what it was I looked it up.

 

Seems you can use a Flash drive, or Compact media to speed up your system. Wikipedia says some tasks that were 17 seconds became 2 seconds (with 512 ram). Start up is supposed to be quicker to.

 

So I plugged in my 1 g flash (875 mb used for ready boost -San Dics Micro Cruzer) (I guess you are supposed to use 2-3x the amount of ram you have - I have 4g) and did a few restarts.

My system started twice without it at about 33-36 seconds (1 mississippi... real scientific eh?) and twice at 37-43 with it in.

 

So for start up it seems slower.

-------------

Just curious if anyone else has used Flash drives, and if they actually help as they are supposed to.

 

Vista could only use one, but Win7 can use up to 8 of them and something like 256 gigs worth.

[Mortem Desino]

1. Startup is likely slower because you've got a flash drive in your USB port: bios has to check for bootable media.

2. I don't believe that readyboost will speed up boot time. Readyboost is a windows software app. It's not going to speed up anything outside of windows.

3. A friend of mine swears that readyboost is just as good as RAM. I don't believe him. Logically, I'd think that dedicating an empty SATA hard drive as swap space (empty, so its not reading/writing multiple files/swapspace at the same time) would be tons faster than the dinky USB 2.0 protocol.

 

4. Lol'd @ Vista eating flash drive. Chomp chomp chomp.

[aidakeeley]

A system with 512 MB of RAM (the bare minimum for Windows Vista) can see significant gains from ReadyBoost.^[/url] In one test case, ReadyBoost sped up an operation from 11.7 seconds to 2 seconds (increasing physical memory from 512 MB to 1 GB reduced it to 0.8 seconds)

 

That says a lot about this YAMI (yet another MS innovation) to me.

 

• Don't run Vista (or anything) with 512... don't be ridiculous.
• Don't count on MS ever coming up with a good idea - they steal and implement others' ideas fine, but never come up with anything but shit on their own
• FFS, I repeat, don't run anything on 512MB... 'upgrade' to 1GB -- as if you can buy a system that doesn't have multiple GBs now...

Sometimes you just want to punch these meddling knuckleheads in the face. Take your fucking ribbons, your kow-towing frosted-glass prettifying clock-cycle eating crap, and your nifty new packaging... and shove it. Fix what needs fixing and stop trying to wow us with junkware.

 

Or maybe I'm wrong.

[Unstoppable]

The only damned reason I still run windows is because I play the games on it. If it wasn't for that I'd run Linux or something else.

[Serpentine]

If you have a good usb controller on a flash stick, it can be quite good when used with a netbook, on desktop hardware it usually just degrades performance.

[Renzatic]

MS Luv ITT.

 

Readyboost is more about using your flash drive in lieu of your HDD for the swap file. It'll basically speed up boot-up times as much as installing a 2nd HDD specifically for your swap file. In other words, it really won't, but it'll help snapify your tasks inside of Windows by a goodly bit. Specially if you're on a RAM limited machine.

 

Which leads me to my next bit...why the hell are you using Vista on a 512 meg machine? Vista doesn't perform well on anything with less than 2 gig. Even 7, which is much more efficient with the resources, doesn't like having anything below a gig. Upgrade your ram, or install Xubuntu or something. Cuz no matter what you do with Readyboost, or how much you fiddle around with your swap file, you won't get good Vista performance out of your comp as is.

[Baddcog]

That 512 stuff was just quoted off the site link I had given I think.

 

I've got 4 gigs and never use it all, but yeah, 7 takes a gig and vista did too. (7 runs soo much better though).

 

I just came across the ready boost stuff and was trying to figure it out.

[jdude]

Your system starts in 33-36 seconds?!

 

My computer has windows 7 and it takes like 2 minutes to load up. And sometimes randomly the cpu starts to run soooo slow I have to hard turn off my computer because things start running so slow it would take 30 mins to close an operation.

 

1.87ghz core 2 duo

3 gigs DDR2 ram

512 3870 ati

 

My computer's getting old

[aidakeeley]

Your computer is probably infected.

[Baddcog]

Yeah, even Vista started up in about a minute for me. I do have a quad 2.4 but does that make that much difference?

 

I'd try a clean up, registry clean, maybe reformat reinstal. 2 minutes is bad but liveable, but if the cpu really starts to dog I'd think virus too.

[Renzatic]

Your system starts in 33-36 seconds?!

 

My computer has windows 7 and it takes like 2 minutes to load up. And sometimes randomly the cpu starts to run soooo slow I have to hard turn off my computer because things start running so slow it would take 30 mins to close an operation.

 

1.87ghz core 2 duo

3 gigs DDR2 ram

512 3870 ati

 

My computer's getting old

 

I've got 7 installed on my parent's little 1.6 Ghz Pentium Dual Core with 2 gig of ram and an onboard Intel graphics card laptop. It's a computer roughly equivalent to yours, and absolutely hauls...even after 6 months of regular Mom-Use.

 

You have to have something amazingly twisted up in your computer to get 7 to go that slow. Check your performance tab under the Task Manager and see if something (probably a virus) is taking up all your CPU cycles or eating all your ram. If you find something suspicious, go google it and see if you can find a fix-it solution.

[jdude]

Could it be because I upgraded from windows XP to 7 without formatting?

I'm running a legitimate-up-to-date copy of Kaspersky 2010 and it hasn't found anything.

[Renzatic]

Yeah, it's very possible. Even with all these various companies claiming that their upgrades are painless and issue free, I'd never install an OS without doing a complete wipe first and going in fresh.

[Baddcog]

I had read up on 7 and tested the beta before I got it. Didn't want to end up with another Vista.

 

Everything said I could just upgrade, but as usual with Vista nothing is that easy. When I tried upgrade it gave me a 'incompatible' message. So I just did a fresh instal.

Luckily I had OS on one partition and everything on another, so it was a painless task.