Readyboost is amazing

[razel]

Hey HGC,

If you want to maximize the speed on your laptop and it's RAM usage. Try your best not to reboot or turn off unless absolutely necessary, like Windows Updates. Try to sleep instead of turning off and turn off the hybrid sleep. Your laptop will become an instant off/on machine. Also if you have an SD card reader built in you can also try an SD card for Readyboost if the USB sticking out bothers you. Just don't go too crazy buying an expensive, fast one, since that money can be better spent elsewhere.

 

[Throckmorton]

I have a nettop with laptop drive, and 2 GB DDR2 800.

I'm thinking of just getting a cheap 8 GB Class 10 SD card for ReadyBoost. Good enough? I have a very fast Patriot Xporter XT Rage 16 GB USB pen drive, but I'd rather not use that for this purpose.

BTW, what happens when you want to download stuff off your camera SD card? Does removing the ReadyBoost SD card temporarily cause it to reset, forcing a reload of all the cached data?

I would think Readyboost would get messed up if you took out the SD card.

I don't use Readyboost anymore. I switched to eBoostr, because it doesn't have to rewrite the cache every time you boot up or unplug the drive. http://www.eboostr.com/

You should probably get a good quality SD card, not a noname brand. Errors in data = bad

 

[Eug]

Hmmm... They seem to recommend eBoostr for Win XP. They don't push Win 7 on their front page for whatever reason. Were you running ReadyBoost with Vista or Win 7? Some claim it's a lot better in Win 7.

As for the card, I was considering a 4GB Transcend Class 10 for under 10 bucks, but it turns out one guy had problems getting it to work with ReadyBoost. Maybe I'll get a different brand, but 4 GB ones seem rare these days, esp. at the Class 10 speed. Might have to go with 8 GB like I was originally planning, with exFAT or NTFS.

 

[tweakboy]

I have a Rally 2 2GB and first thing I did was enable this readyboost of vista and then W7

Throckton you said it right,, readyboost and RAM are two seperate things. No matter how much RAM you have your readyboost will always work and use that space to put a temp file which is 2GB lets say and it puts stuff in there like Throckton said.. application launches are quicker,, the OS is snappier. Some people cant tell a difference and since Ive always used it I cant say anything. Thanks gg

 

[Makaveli]

Just buy an SSD and forget all this readyboost nonsense.

 

[Eug]

Just buy an SSD and forget all this readyboost nonsense.

An SSD for a couple of hundred bux, for a computer I paid $259.99 for? No thanks. Not to mention it voids the warranty on this unit.

Anyways, I've since bought a 4 GB Class 10 Transcend SDHC flash card. I haven't done any formal benches, but it does seem to help somewhat for overall system responsiveness. The machine has 2048 MB RAM, with 128 MB dedicated to video. (I figure that should be enough for Blu-ray playback and general 2D Win 7 usage.)

I suspect part of the reason I do notice a difference (even with 1.87 GB RAM) is because my hard drive is a laptop drive, and my flash memory has a minimum transfer rate of 15 MB/s according to HT Tune. ie. Get a fast desktop hard drive and a slow 2.5 MB/s flash card for ReadyBoost, and I suspect your computer may just slow down, even with the flash drive's fast access times.

P.S. Anyone know why my CPU usage is -1%?

 

[Makaveli]

An SSD for a couple of hundred bux, for a computer I paid $259.99 for? No thanks. Not to mention it voids the warranty on this unit.

Anyways, I've since bought a 4 GB Class 10 Transcend SDHC flash card. I haven't done any formal benches, but it does seem to help somewhat for overall system responsiveness. The machine has 2048 MB RAM, with 128 MB dedicated to video. (I figure that should be enough for Blu-ray playback and general 2D Win 7 usage.)

I suspect part of the reason I do notice a difference (even with 1.87 GB RAM) is because my hard drive is a laptop drive, and my flash memory has a minimum transfer rate of 15 MB/s according to HT Tune. ie. Get a fast desktop hard drive and a slow 2.5 MB/s flash card for ReadyBoost, and I suspect your computer may just slow down, even with the flash drive's fast access times.

P.S. Anyone know why my CPU usage is -1%?

lol I didn't read the whole thread didn't know it was a $250 dollar computer.

As you were.............

 

[Eug]

Actually, I didn't mention that before. But yeah, I likely wouldn't use ReadyBoost on my primary machine (that is if I ran Win 7 on it): Core i7 iMac, with fast internal hard drive, external FW800 drives, and 8 GB RAM. SSD might make more sense in that context... although it'd be awfully expensive to get the 500 GB drive I'd want for just for the boot drive. 😉 And my (multiple) data drives are 500 GB to 1 TB.

However my secondary computer (the one I'm typing on right now) is a dual-Atom machine with 2 GB RAM and laptop hard drive. Cost me $259.99. 🙂 ReadyBoost (with a 16 MB/s flash card) is nice on this machine.

I used to say that responsiveness on this machine was adequate/reasonable. Now, dare I say it, it is quite decent. To put it another way, it used to feel like a laptop to me. Now it feels like a desktop. Not an uber fast one, but one I'd be fine doing business apps on all day long.

Not a bad upgrade for CAD$12.99.

 

[FishAk]

What does the original cost of your computer have to do with how well you want it to work now? Spend $125ish and put a 500Gb hybrid drive in there. If you need to send it in for warrenty work, put the original drive back in.

With the hybrid drive, you won't wonder if you really can tell a difference or not.

 

[Eug]

I thought it was pretty obvious. A $125 drive totally defeats the point of a low cost computer. That would increase the price almost 50%. At that point you'd be better off not buying an Atom machine. The ReadyBoost upgrade cost an extra 5%. That's a ten-fold difference. (!)

Anyways, for this computer, if you crack the case you void the warranty, so it's a moot argument.

P.S. There isn't much wondering about the improvement. It is real. It may not have been noticeable though had the computer overall been faster and the flash card been slower.