Is ReadyBoost really of any help with 8gb of ram?

[PascalT]

I am using Vista 64 with 8gb of RAM along with a 4gb Apacer USB drive. When I boot my computer the chugging to write the cache on the USB drive slows things down.

I am wondering if it's even worth it given the amount of RAM I have? I have the pagefile disabled as well.

Thanks

 

[Seppe]

Not really. Readyboost, in my experience, is only useful with 2gb ram or less. Anything beyond 4gb should be ok for vista without readyboost. I have 4gb in my laptop now and to be honest i didnt even try my memory stick with it, its only 1gb though.

Anyway i think superfetch is enough for me to take care of my caching

 

[Aberforth]

You should never disable Pagefile, some applications are not designed to handle large memory addressing, especially 32bit apps can only use 2 GB memory. So readyboost might help a little, but having more ram will certainly increase overall responsiveness and reduce disc access. In some cases slow thumbdrives decreases the overall speed when readyboost is enabled, get a thumb drive with at least 10mb/s read speed, like Patriot Xporter XT3 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/...?Item=N82E16820220261)

 

[PascalT]

Well I lied, I actually have a 512mb/512mb pagefile I enabled yesterday. It can't hurt I guess.

thanks

 

[Scotteq]

ReadyBoost - If you have a PC running some marginal amount of RAm (512/1GB), it can provide a nice boost to performance. 2GB, less so but still perhaps noticable depending on what you may be doing. If you have more than 2GB of RAM I doubt you'd notice any different. Since you have 8, I wouldn't bother using it at all.

Pagefile - 512MB is good. Shutting it off could lead to Blue Screens should some program you have running need to swap data in/out of memory. As indicated earlier, individual 32 bit apps still have their 32 bit limitations. If something needs to swap and cannot, the results can be.... inelegant.

 

[gpse]

Just make sure not to disbale the service for Readyboost, because it is tied to ReadyBoot. I had it disabled and my PC took forever to boot up.

 

[BD2003]

Well, with 8GB of ram, it would serve very little purpose.

But either way, the PC is going to chug a while on boot even without RB - superfetch has 8GB of ram to fill up. And the chugging isnt damaging performance as much as it sounds like it is - not all chugging is made equal. Theres the bad, swapping chugging, and the something is loading chugging - both which lead to slowdown. The SF chugging is a loading in the background, sounds like its slowing you down but isnt really kind of chugging. So try and ignore it - its normal, and its a good thing.

The solution? Dont shut down - use suspend instead, which takes next to zero power (2W or so), and it pops right back on in a few seconds rather than the few minutes booting takes.

One thing I've noticed - the RB cache seems to be initially filled with the exact same data SF caches. If you plug in a stick long after you're already booted, it wont hit the HD at all but it'll fill right up. On high memory systems, the only purpose RB seems to serve is a quiet, quick way to refill the SF cache after you close a huge program.