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    Ready Boost Thumb Drive Concerns

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by gadawg31, Oct 3, 2008.

  1. gadawg31

    gadawg31 Notebook Enthusiast

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    Does anyone have any information on the Ready Boost Thumb Drives? I recently purchased a new Toshiba L305D and it came with 2gb ram and I was told an easy way to increase the memory without buying new ram was to purchase this Ready Boost. I have seen it in stores, but I am weary about buying it and it not working with Vista. Anyone have any thoughts or opinions? Thanks.

    gadawg
     
    gadawg31, Oct 3, 2008
    #1
  2. Lithus

    Lithus NBR Janitor

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    Readyboost does not do anything if you have over 1 GB of RAM. Buy 2 more GB of RAM instead.
     
    Lithus, Oct 3, 2008
    #2
  3. jisaac

    jisaac Notebook Deity

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    its rubbish.. forget about it
     
    jisaac, Oct 3, 2008
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  4. paulmt123

    paulmt123 Notebook Guru

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    Ready boost slows my PC down. Flight SIM took 1 minute 20 seconds to load with it on, and only 36 seconds with it off!
    This is with 2GB RAM.

    However out of curiosity I disabled readyboost, disabled hard drive swap file and put a 3.5GB swap file on a 4GB memory card in the laptops express card reader.

    Here are the results each from a clean boot of windows vista.

    Task Swap file on hard drive Swap File on SD card

    Flight Sim load to menu 36s 14s
    Flight Sim load default flight 2 mins 10 secs 1 min 12 secs
    Need for speed carbon load 12 secs 6 secs
    Windows Load 53 secs 46 secs
    Microsoft Outlook load email 19 secs 8 secs

    The PC (already pretty quick apart from for flight sim) now feels like a high end desktop in loading performance. Wouldn't be suprised if it outperformed it!

    Its brilliant! And all it takes is a little SD card sticking out of my card reader which I take out if I wanna upload photo's (enough memory on PC to do that without swap file) and then put back in afterwards.
    Or I could use separate reader instead. The PC express reader I purchased reads at 18MB/sec.
     
    paulmt123, Oct 15, 2008
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  5. temagic

    temagic Notebook Consultant

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    You need an SDHC card class 6, with the best speed you can find, and a size of about 2-4GB. Then readyboost WILL speed up loading of programs. Beware though, the first programload will NOT speed up, as small files are written to the SD-card during first load. Second load, third load etc. will load the files off the SD-card, giving the latency bonus that flash has over harddrives, resulting in a performance increase. Unfortunately, the ReadyBoost files on teh SD-card will be wiped after each reboot of the system.

    On another note, considering the cost of high capacity, high speed SD-cards, you'd probably be better off just upgrading your RAM to 4GB, if your system supports that amount.

    However, saying that ReadyBoost doesn't speed the system up is in my opinion wrong. But then, I've never run ReadyBoost off of a SD-card, just my inbuilt Intel Turbo Memory mini-PCI card.
     
    temagic, Oct 15, 2008
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  6. Fishy

    Fishy Notebook Evangelist

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    Is the swap file your referring to the windows page file?
    What about just disabling it all together?...Having all your system memory running off your RAM and nothing else..?
     
    Fishy, Oct 16, 2008
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