How to Speed up Windows

[Aastii]

I won't buy into it unless I actually see some hard data. USB dirves are going to be way slower than a hard disk, so it is in return slower than virtual memory. Plus since Windows caches things out to RAM now on the constant since Vista, if you have 4gigs of RAM it most likely won't do much at all, and probably do nothing.

I think it is just a marketing scheme where MS had to put in features that competitors don't support. If it was truly that awesome of an idea, open source would have had it a long time ago. Since open source is generally ahead of closed source by several years in terms of technology.

I agree with what you say about systems with ample memory, for a system with 4+ GB of memory, it has enough to store all programs, and have plenty of space free. However, as I said, on older systems, or lower end systems, especially the likes of netbooks or your very small form factor systems which will generally have very low specs, I have found it helps

 

[tlarkin]

I agree with what you say about systems with ample memory, for a system with 4+ GB of memory, it has enough to store all programs, and have plenty of space free. However, as I said, on older systems, or lower end systems, especially the likes of netbooks or your very small form factor systems which will generally have very low specs, I have found it helps

I am talking about virtual memory, ie hard disks. A hard drive is already way faster than any USB flash drive stick, therefore it would be slower than virtual memory which is the slowest memory the OS can use.

 

[Aastii]

I don't know the ins and outs of how it works, however, consider this - what if it helped to share load? It isn't black and white, enableing Ready Boost doesn't disable hard drive cacheing, that still happens. If you are able to cache to the hard drive and the USB flash device, even though the USB is slower, it will still grant greater performance because of the extra bandwidth.

I'm not saying my netbook magically got the speed of a $2000 system, but I am saying that things which would take a few seconds to load, or if I had a few applications running at once, when one of the programs would momentarily hang, or just through general use, everything was much snappier

 

[tlarkin]

OK, I looked it up and researched it a bit. Ready boost does in fact boost performance but there are some exceptions where it actually did boost performance. When it did boost performance it was barely marginal in benchmark scores, which means end users probably won't see much of a real world benefit, unless the task they are doing is very memory intensive.

The time when ready boost increased performance the most is when the system only had 512MB of RAM. At about the 2gig of RAM mark you see Ready Boost actually hurting system performance a bit.

So I guess in theory, if you have under 2gig of RAM it may help a bit. Probably won't be noticeable, and if you have 2 or more Gigs of RAM don't bother.

 

[Perkomate]

and so how do you get this ReadyBoost to work? Do i just have to format the USB to FAT32 and then click on the ReadyBoost option in auto play?

 

[wolfeking]

yes, the readyboost is in the autoplay options.

 

[Aastii]

and so how do you get this ReadyBoost to work? Do i just have to format the USB to FAT32 and then click on the ReadyBoost option in auto play?

5. Enable ReadyBoost.

If you are running a system with less than 2GB of memory, you can utilise a feature called ReadyBoost. If you have a USB memory stick, you can use it as extra memory, which can make your system much more responsive. To do so:

Plug in your USB memory stick
When autoplay comes up, select the drive for ReadyBoost
If the option doesn't come up, or if you have disabled the device for ready boost,

Go to Start > Computer
Right click your memory stick
Click enable this drive for ReadyBoost

The way to get best performance is to have a USB drive equal to or greater than the amount of system memory. So, if you have 1GB RAM, a 1GB memory stick or greater is the best option.

 

[tlarkin]

The only time Ready Boost ever boosted performance is if you have under 2gigs of RAM. Otherwise it does nothing. This info is from benchmarks I read off of anandtech.com's website, and a few other people's tech blogs who also ran benchmarks.

Benchmarks also push systems to specific limits, so a marginal benchmark boost doesn't always affect actual performance in day to day usage.

The charts I saw made it a marginal boost as well, plus since USB ports are a burst speed bus, you are not going to get a constant 480mbps bandwidth to the device. Upgrading your RAM is far better to boost performance.

 

[Perkomate]

i was going to try it on my crappy school-provided netbook with Atom 1.6ghz and 1 gig of RAM. hopefully it makes it a bit more bearable. It won't even play 360p youtube on the small screen mode, without changing Google Chrome to high priority in task manager. And even then it lags.

 

[spynoodle]

Hey Aastii, any idea if putting my page file on another drive would help speed up my Celeron rig? I had the idea a couple days ago, and since I have a relatively small amount of RAM, I figured it might help.

 

[linkin]

If anyone has an SSD, create a 1024mb pagefile on it and disable all other pagefiles, you will have awesome performance and snappiness all around

 

[Aastii]

Hey Aastii, any idea if putting my page file on another drive would help speed up my Celeron rig? I had the idea a couple days ago, and since I have a relatively small amount of RAM, I figured it might help.

It shouldn't really matter what drive the page file is on. To be honest, I don't quite understand what you mean.

Are you saying you have more than one drive, so you will have C:\ with OS and whatever on, then D:\ with other stuff and page file? If so, you could try it, but I doubt it would make a shade of difference

 

[spynoodle]

It shouldn't really matter what drive the page file is on. To be honest, I don't quite understand what you mean.

Are you saying you have more than one drive, so you will have C:\ with OS and whatever on, then D:\ with other stuff and page file? If so, you could try it, but I doubt it would make a shade of difference

Yeah, I was just thinking that if I put my page file on a separate drive, it would reduce the load on my main drive. Ever since I installed Crunchbang linux a few days ago, though, my system's been a crap load faster. I think Linux handles the PF really well. It seems to create a separate partition called "swap," which I think is the linux version of a page file.

Best way to speed up Windows: switch to Linux.

 

[mehul]

I use CCleaner

 

[Hero]

Pretty nice Job, although all of this seems pretty obvious.

 

[TFT]

This forum caters for all levels of knowledge, obviously our members are way below your level.
Look forward to your helpful posts.

 

[DaveSi677]

This forum caters for all levels of knowledge, obviously our members are way below your level.
Look forward to your helpful posts.

Toucher!!!!

 

[tlarkin]

If anyone has an SSD, create a 1024mb pagefile on it and disable all other pagefiles, you will have awesome performance and snappiness all around

I am not so sure if that is such a good idea...SSD or not it won't be faster than cache or RAM, and I don't think you want all that disk I/O writing to your SSD since that is sort of an issue with a lot of them.

 

[Organon]

really useful topic ..

u can use disck cleanup ..

 

[Perkomate]

dat thread necromancy