The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
I tried it this week with my new HP desktop - put a 2 gig SD card into the card-reader. I haven't noticed any difference yet. What is interesting though, is to hear how much the hard-drive thrashes when you first boot up and log in. I've watched the Task Mgr and noticed that the thrashing stops as soon as the free RAM drops to 3-5 Mb. A lot of people complained, at first, about Vista being a RAM hog - but the final answer appears to be that Vista just uses all of your RAM - to avoid going out to pagefile and slowing down your system.
I have 1GB Ram and found Installing programs so painfully slow. I was ready to go back to XP it was so bad. Then I went to toms hardware and found a good cost/performance USB key was the transcend 150 range. I found one on Ebay - 2Gb for only $23 Australian. It's still slow at installing programs but what a difference it made. I'm now waiting for my 2GB of Ram to arrive. with that installed as well, should be much better.
In conclusion, if you have a speedy USB key, do it. My 3 year old 1Gb one was pretty useless at speeding up anything so I'd recommend getting something new and fast.
I used ReadyBoost with a 1GB SD card for a little while after I got my Vista machine. I can't say that I noticed any improvement, but the one thing I did notice was a lot of static during mp3 playback. Even though nothing was running except WMP, Vista was still writing data to the SD card, and this was causing a lot of interference. I unmounted and removed the card and the static stopped -- and I haven't used ReadyBoost since.
Intresting. I have a 1gb sd card plugged in with 2gb of Ram. Seems a little faster but I did notice yesterday a couple mp3 files sounded crappy but I just dismissed it as a bad recording. Ill have to go back and take the SD card out. Somewhere I read that if you have 2gb of ram you don't benifit much from ready boost. Wonder if I'm just fooling myself using it.
so vista wont run at 1gig? how was it? I hope its faster than my 256mb xp notebook or ill have to spend some $ on another gig the problem is my location radioshack sells em for almost 200 bucks 1 gig ddr2..
Looks like my mp3's tend to stutter at times when I have my readyboost sd card in. So much for that , looks like the 1gb card is going back into my Digital Camera where it belongs. Readyboost is a bust!
Yes, if your dv2000 came with windows vista preinstalled. Your 1gig sd card also needs to conform to a high speed spec so Vista can use it as RAM memory.
I just though I'd clarify a couple of things. ReadyBoost is not an extension of system RAM. It is a hard disk cache. Basically, hard drives, particularly those in notebooks, are quite slow, and not at all ideal for quickly accessing random small files spread all over the disk.
So, in Vista, any free RAM unused at a given moment gets allocated as a disk cache, where files Vista thinks you may need soon get copied, so that when you do need to access them, they can be retrieved more quickly. (This is why you may notice your hard drive working hard right at boot-up as Vista copies data to free RAM.) ReadyBoost works similarly, though the files in the ReadyBoost device's cache don't get updated as frequently as those in the system RAM. Basically, files that get accessed frequently get copied to the USB key or SD card device (in an encrypted format), and then get read back from there instead of the hard drive when needed. This, in many cases, can lead to a fairly significant increase in the speed of opening regularly-used programs.
But it should be mentioned again, that using a ReadyBoost device in no way effects how much RAM is available to a program. If you are using programs that require a lot of RAM, ReadyBoost won't really help, and the system will still end up paging to the hard disk often. If you don't have much RAM though, then the system can't use free RAM as a disk cache and ReadyBoost can speed up program loads nicely, but speed once in apps won't really be effected much. If you can afford it, more RAM is definitely a better way to go if your system is running slow.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
