Readyboost in....XP! Yes XP!

"Many XP users are desperate to use a feature like Vista Readyboost on XP. It seems in some cases that people hate to wait for a program to be released; which is a shame considering how the best things in life comes with patience. However, for those of you who can’t wait for programmers to release a simple application, you can use Windows XP unspoken Readyboost Feature."

http://www.windowsxlive.net/?p=1337

Put a Windows virtual memory file into a flash drive instead of a hard drive.
If this really pulls off, guess there is another reason to use XP.

 

readyboost barely works in vista, what makes people think xp will manage better.

 

Putting swap on a flashdrive is not the same as ReadyBoost.

The reason both this and Vista ReadyBoost suck is because ram is cheap and faster than flash. Slightly useful if you have very little ram and a flash drive lying around.

 

Any computer that needs extra memory via a readyboost feature in XP needs to upgrade pronto. Heck, with XP you only need 512 mb ram to easily surf, word process, watch movies, and even play older games. You would be better spent spending 40 bucks and getting a 512 mb stick of DDR ram for your low end clunker of a system.

 

ReadyBoost was never meant to be a permanent solution. It was meant for older machines as a way to boost the cache size within Vista. I find it kind of ridiculous when people go out and by 8gb flash drives to use with ReadyBoost expecting a huge jump in performance.

 

Some tip this is. If you have enough RAM you the pagefile is rarely used anyway. XP pages when the system is idle or when an app is close or idle too long.

If you're constantly going to a pagefile this isn't going to help.

The only upside to this would be allowing asynchronous writes in a system that only has 1 harddrive such as in a notebook. You won't get a huge gain from this if you have enough RAM, if you don't have enough RAM this might be even slower due to transfer rates.

You might get better start up times if you can move the prefetch folder so you can do async reads.

 

Think of readyboost as a cheap way to help a system that has little ram or has its ram maxed out (say 1gb) and you can buy/have a cheap usb or Secure digital card.

With new laptops and everyone getting more than 1gb ram , the readyboost device gets barely used and therefore doesn't do anything except take up your SD slot.

 

Flash drives have a very finite write-cycle life. Why anyone would use a flash drive as a virtual memory device is beyond me.

 

The day I need to stick sticks into my computer to make it go faster will be the day I stop using Windows. The idea that people could consider it normal to have flash drives poking out of their laptops to make an operating system work is incomprehensible to me.

 

Not necessarily a big deal to use ready boost. but hey, if you got the stuff already why not? you pull every trick you can right? i have a 1 gb sandisk cruzer flashdrive im using as ready boost. it works awesome. heres the trick for using ANY flash drive as a ready boost device.



Will it improve your system markedly? prolly not. can u atleast use whatever flash drive you have and get a tiny bit of oomph from it? yeah. and again, if you have a flash drive, why not do it? wont hurt at all, and if you get anything at all out of it, then hey, you are ahead that much more for free.

will readyboost work on XP? i dunno. maybe. sometimes you get lucky. but i agree with whoever said ready boost on XP wasnt really that necessary. Vista is more RAM hungry so its worth it for that. anyhow, try it if you like, if not its all good too.

ev

 

Exactly, I rather buy new sticks of RAM than depend on Ready Boost to make my PC faster.

 

There are two reasons to use ReadyBoost:

1.) You maxed out your RAM, and you'd rather not replace most of your PC or get a new one to help run applications. ReadyBoost helps a bit here, delaying the death of older PCs by allowing people the option to shove sticks into their PCs for a slight performance upgrade.

2.) Why not? Many people already have flash drives. I have a 1gb stick that I used for transporting school work from my personal computer to the ones at school. With Vista, I can slap that in for a slight performance upgrade at no extra cost. Sounds good to me.

I for one find ReadyBoost nifty. Not something I'd use as a selling point for an OS, but nifty and not totally useless.

 

I think ReadyBoost is 10% improvement and 90% all in the users mind.

 

You have a 1 Gig stick for school work. You use this stick for ready boost. 5 months in to using the stick for school and ready boost you find that it has become really slow and your work's corrupt. Turns out readyboost toasted your 1 gig stick's finite write cycle. It wasn't such a good idea to use an important USB key with important info as readyboost now is it?

Readyboost works in Vista because it tests the stick to see the fastest it can read and write at then adjusts the pagefile sizes accordingly. Say a game need 256megs of pagefile. The USB stick has a burst of say ~30 megs/sec. It will therefore split the 256 megs in to a few ~30 meg chunks it can burst at. Vista also tries to spread writing in to different sectors to extend the life of the drive.

XP doesn't have this. It keeps a standard method of Pagefile which makes it a contiguous chunk and will keep writing as close to the beginning of the drive as possible and keeping the file contiguous. This means 2 things, it won't be able to prefetch the right chunks as quickly as Vista and your USB goes bye bye quicker.

 

Readyboost on Vista is like a Flintstones car with the space underneath for you to run with your feet. Except all the other cars on the road have real engines and real chassis.

 

I have 2GB of ram and I turned all of my Virtual Memory off on all drives. hehe

 

My laptop RAM is maxed out at 384 MB. I have a number of 1GB USB flash drives lying around that I've gotten for free (thanks Amazon!). Obviously my system is grossly out of date and needs to be replaced, but would something like this make it a bit more usable for another month - 6 weeks of use? Or not worth the effort?

 

On external memory devices like SD and CompactFlash, wear-leveling is implemented, making the devices last as long as hard drives. Realize also that this is a write limit, not a read limit, so it's actually well-suited to swap. Swap isn't very often written to, not nearly as much as other parts of a disk.

But either way, what he's suggesting is simply putting your swap file on a flash drive. Decent idea in theory, but Windows doesn't operate well when swap files are no longer accessible should you just pull it out. So this isn't ReadyBoost on XP, it's just putting your swap on a flash drive, which is VERY DANGEROUS. I recommend against it. I also recommend against his suggestion that your swap file be 2x what your memory is... there's no reason for a swap file to ever go over 1GB. Your machine will be nearly dead by that time, anyway, what with having to page everything out.

 

^ I run my XP without a swap file. 2 gigs of system ram. Never had any faults.

 

Not really as true as it once was. Modern NAND flash write-cycle life is as good as, or better than what we see in modern hard drives.

 

I know of a bunch of people who do that without any problems... But I hear over and over again that it is not a good thing to do. Why?

 

Once you run out of that 2048MB, you crash. Also, some apps like Photoshop need a swapfile present.

 

u're kidding right? it took the author in the article that was posted in the first post 8 months (since the release of vista) to come up with such a idiotic idea? does the author actually know what readyboost is? readyboost is not the same as the paging file, it is a cache for the paging file! anything that is written to the readyboost device will also be written to the paging file on the hdd. This way when u accidentally remove the readyboost device there won't be any data lost; but in this case, by using the flash disk as the paging file there will be!

 

I think people thought of it before Vista, and ruined many a flash drive that way.

 

not as a substitute for readyboost they couldn't readyboost was introduced with vista. the author can post all he likes about the advantages of putting the paging file on the flash disk as opposed to putting it on the hdd all he likes, but saying it's a xp version of readyboost is wrong for the reason that i've stated above.

 

Vista's memory management is very different from that of XP. Readyboost is not an extension of the paging file, but a caching system, much like the prefectcher (or superfetch as vista likes to call it).

Readyboost works by copying some of the prefetcher data onto a flash drive. Since flash drives are much quicker than hard disks at random read/writes, they are perfectly suited for holding data from the prefetcher as it contains many small fragments of files.

The Paging File is an area on the hard disk where data is temporarily stored from the RAM. This data can be anything from images or system files.

Windows will only allow you to store the paging file on the hard disk or an internal non removable disk, not a removable drive (e.g. a flash drive). The reason for this is pretty obvious really, if there are vital system files on the paging file located on a removable disk, what happens when you remove it?

Windows Readyboost has all this covered. Because the data is only cached, it is not that important to the working of the system, and the system can work without it. As well as this, all the data stored on a readyboost disk is backed up on the hard disk so the system can have something to fall back on.

Personally, i reccomend using vista, even if your hardware is not all quite up to it. The operating system may be power hungry, but its memory management is very effective.

Hope this has been a help.