Re: ReadyBoost on Windows XP ?? Do it yourself !

[Nick N]

I was going to wait till you guys got finished ... I guess you figured it out

Even if it worked, putting your page file on a flash stick is never going to boost anything.


First of all,
The flash memory can not be read or written faster than a hard drive, at least not in this day and age. Solid state hard drives are now becoming of age and you can get a 76GB for about 3000 bucks that will run 2X faster than any mechanical drive off the SATA or IDE. USB sticks are currently limited to the technology of the stick, not the port. The port can handle the speed, the stick can't. You would be better off on a USB external hard drive with such methods... even though moving the Windows page file is not going to net you any speed. It may even slow you down.


Second,
The process being used in Vista has success because the OS is designed to allocate the resources and use them with the feature. Even so, anyone using a USB flash drive for memory in Vista, unless you are just plain desperate, is getting some success but it is very limited and most likely psychosomatic although if the system is running 1 gig or less with FSX I can see where having a bit more available will help. As flash stick speeds get better that feature in Vista may have real benefit but for the cost of real memory sticks as compared to the cost of state of the art flash sticks, I think it

[Daube]

Hi Nick, thanks for those infos.

In fact, I am running only 1 Gb of RAM, and most important, IDE harddrives. By setting the virtual memory on the flashdrive, I was not hopping any transfer speed boost, but more a access time improvement, reducing the stutters while scenery is being reloaded for display. Actually, any harddrive activity has a strong negative impact on the performance of my old PC, and even with some good tweaking, the scenery loading while making a 360 turn over a very dense area make my FPS drop from 20 to 15, sometimes even 12, for 5 seconds or so. Then, when the displayed scenery is fully loaded, the FPS get back to 20.

So, I was simply hopping to reduce this little FPS drop by using those flashdrives, without having to buy a second Gig of RAM.

However, with your explanations I now understand that the Readyboost of Vista is not simply a swap file on flashdrives, since there seems to be some optimisations to make it work properly. There simply one thing I disagree with in your last post:

[quote]Best practice for page files.. always on the Windows partition and set to

[Nick N]

[quote]

[quote]Best practice for page files.. always on the Windows partition and set to

[DizZa]

If someone had 8gb of RAM would it make sence for them to disable the page file altogether?

[Daube]

Ah OK, I see...
I didn't know about this automatic defrag of the page file when setting it to dynamic size.
What I used to do since several years, just like you've described above, was to set it OFF, then reboot, then defrag the whole partition (or disk), then enable it again to specified fixed size. I'll try the dynamic setting, to chek if I notice any difference in the long-term...

[Ashton Lawson]

Wow Nick.  You really know your stuff.

As of now, I'm giving up this whole thing with flash drives.

[Nick N]

Ah OK, I see...
I didn't know about this automatic defrag of the page file when setting it to dynamic size.
What I used to do since several years, just like you've described above, was to set it OFF, then reboot, then defrag the whole partition (or disk), then enable it again to specified fixed size. I'll try the dynamic setting, to chek if I notice any difference in the long-term...

It

[Nick N]

[quote]Wow Nick.

[Ashton Lawson]

yup, definately giving up...

sad tho... :-/