Best way to set up HDD/RAM/Readyboost for 32 bit

[p3matty]

I currently have a 32 bit Vista Home Premium machine with 4 GB of RAM. I know I'm already over my limit of RAM with a 32 bit operating system, but with flash drives and HDDs so cheap, I was wondering what the best way to set them up for speed and responsiveness would be.

Currently I have 2 320GB drives in a RAID 0 array (with important files backed up on an external 500GB).

One question is about the pagefile. How big, where should it go, can it be on a flash drive with readyboost? Is readyboost really worth it? Should I format the flash drive before setting it up for readyboost, and if so, how?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

 

[alvine]

personally I tried readyboost on my laptop using my 4gb flash drive and it does boot faster and the system responds much faster but when I played games (counter strike source) my fps will be much lower and the light on the flash drive was blinking all the time, I took it out while playing and I saw my fps going from 68 to 92 😛

so readyboost is worth it, just make sure your using good flash drive with good speeds, dont use it if your gaming (based on my own experience)

 

[geofelt]

Readyboost is very much misunderstood. The premise is this: A suitably fast usb drive is very good on random access of small files, much faster than a hard drive. For larger data transfers, a hard drive is much faster, even though it's access time is longer. What ready boost does is look at the files that you use regularly, and if it thinks that a usb drive can access them faster than a hard drive, it makes a copy on the readyboost device. Then any accesses to those small modules can be faster.

At boot time, or any time thereafter, readyboost can verify that the usb drive has not been removed, and it may retrieve some of the boot files from the usb device. It is a no lose situation to use one, but the benefits may be minimal because those very small files don't take that much time to load anyway.

 

[p3matty]

What about the pagefile? How big, and where should it be placed? Can it go on a flash drive as well, or a separate hard drive? How big should I make it on this system?

 

[geofelt]

4gb largely eliminates the need to worry about the page file. The best place would be on a separate non raid hard drive, not a usb drive. I don't think you can put a page file on a usb drive anyway, because a usb drive can be removed.

 

[roisin]

OMG! You have extra RAM that you can utilize which has nano-second access time, and you're asking to set up a USB flash drive which has write speeds cripplingly slower even than your HDD?

Microsoft brought out the whole thing of TurboCache when they started selling Vista to the public. Ridiculous idea, which is why it's not on everyone's lips right now. The reality is Microsoft software contains inordinate amounts of DRM and spyware. These logging and scanning applications use the HDD to cache thousands of files just when you turn on your computer and load Steam and Firefox etc.

I got around this incredible inefficiency on my 32bit systems by creating a RAMdisk to utilize the RAM windows can't access. So for an 8GB system, 3GB goes to windows and that leaves me with 5GB virtual drive, set up on RAM to play about with.

Google: planetamd64 use more than 3gb ram in xp
(or go here to check out some info)
http://www.planetamd64.com/index.php?showtopic=38005

You MUST put the IE temp internet files on it. (speeds up your system)
you should put Firefox cache on RAM also.
Definitely the JAVA temp files, speeds up Java applications online. (Chat, etc)

And omg YES definitely the swapfile. For some reason, no matter how much RAM you have, windows still uses the HDD to store and hold data. For no apparent reason except I guess that your HDD data is stored like a fingerprint. (I presume part and parcel of the whole DRM thang) I've been running Windows with swapfile on-RAM and my God it just doesn't lag this way 4GB is enough to set up a 1GB RAMdrive and a 256 or 512 Swapfile.

There's just so much unimportant junk you can you can set your system to move to the RAM. And it gets wiped when you turn your computer off.

I recently had to set the system to use the HDD as I modified the RAMdisk settings. Jesus Christ, I had forgotten what lagging was all about. So used to instant application loads, and pretty much zero delays on opening files etc.

Note:
On XP 32bit some legacy applications tend to lag on quad cores, like Media Player Classic. But there is an excellent piece of freeware which can be set to run on startup and automatically allocate 1, 2, 3 or 4 cores in whichever order to any application, and it can save Profiles settings.

http://www.koma-code.de
Software -> CPU-Control