Simple Memory Tweak to Boost Performance on Windows Vista Using a Flash Drive
Posted by Wilk | Filed under Computer
For those of you "stuck" with Vista, there’s a little known super fast and easy performance tweak available for anyone with a flash drive, for that matter, a CF card, SD card or other with a USB card reader, there is a quick and easy way to speed up your machine when you’re doing memory intensive projects, such as editing photos. This is something that you can’t get with XP and is a real selling point for power users, I think.
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The process could not be simpler. Once you are booted up to the desktop, simply put your stick in a USB port. The Autoplay dialog box will come up… scroll to the last item which says "Speed up my system". double click that or highlight it and click OK. you may be presented with a second dialog box which asks how much of the USB device’s memory you want to use, the default is usually just fine, it typically figures about half of the available memory. Click OK.
That’s it! The flash memory may not be as fast as more physical memory in your machine, but it will be a darned site faster than relying on disk caching.
With the cost of flash drives these days, there’s no excuse not to have one. An 8gb drive can be had for around $50-60… that’s a lot cheaper and easier than getting more ram for your computer. It’s not AS good as more memory, but it’s a fantastic work-around for those that don’t have enough.
Vista claims you will not be able to use the stick for writing files, but i have not found that entirely true. I’ve had some problems saving new image files in Photoshop, but at least with smaller files such as this one I’m writing right now on my laptop in Dreamweaver, it’s not true. I can save existing and new files. I guess it depends a lot on how much memory you let Vista use on your stick and how much room on the stick is left free. I have an 8 gig flash drive that I use for this purpose occasionally and Vista want’s to use about half that, which currently leaves me with about a gig and a half for storage.
Worse comes to worse, you could always use two flash drives, one for storage and one totally dedicated to memory swap usage in Vista.
