more ram with sd card with vista??

one of my friends recently told me that you can use an sd card to increase the amount of ram on your system to increase performance...he has vista and so do i....is this true that u can do that?...i have 2 gigs of ram and i was wondering if i could use an sd card to improve my performance.....

 

You can, it's called ready boost or something like that where you can use flash ram as actual system ram. But it is very slow compared to the rest of the system ram, and it's supposed to only be used when a computer has very little ram.

Since you already have 2gb, this extra slow ram will do nothing for you in terms of benefits. It might actually hurt performance.

 

NO! Readyboost does NOT act as actual system ram. It is ONLY a cache for the hard drive. The two concepts are very different. What it does do is increase the performance of machines with less ram, making them ACT as if they did have more ram. It helps to speed up paging of memory. But if you have more REAL ram you would not be paging memory as often in the first place.

Gary

 

Isn't that what system memory is? Something that is cached by the system for quick access (as apposed to storing it to the much slower hard drive)

 

No, not really. A cache is an intermediate storage location. It might be memory on a hard drive, it might be a portion of the computers own memory, or in the case of ReadyBoost a USB or SD card. You can't use anything stored in a cache, without it being moved to main memory first. All ReadyBoost does is redirect certain I/O that would have gone to the hard drive, to the SD card AND to the hard drive. Then latter if the request for retrieval of the previously written data can be recovered from the SD card, it does so. The results of that retrieval are then moved to system memory for the application or OS to use. The application or OS never reads or writes to the SD card directly only ReadyBoost is doing that.

Gary