I thought I would post a bit of positive feedback about eBoostr since ive found it quite useful with 2 different PCs. Basically it's a third party ReadyBoost program, the latest version works with xp/vista/w7. What I have used it for is:
Old Toshiba 5200-902 with windows xp, cann't upgrade to vista or w7 due to odd hardware configuration and its max memory is 1GB. I upgraded the internal hard drive to a 40GB 7200rpm drive quite some time ago, but due to the small capacity it only gets about 20MB/s throughput at best. The laptop does however have USB2 ports (should be able to get about 40MB/s out of these) and sure enough, using a 2GB fast pendrive cuts the loadtime of stuff like mozilla and outlook express in half.
The second computer is a newer i7 system with 6GB ram, I was hoping to get a SSD for this after a month or so, but since the prices have rocketed I am stuck with a 1TB drive instead for the moment. Apart from the odd time in photoshop, most the ram is going to waste, even when running games it probably peaks at around 3GB used. eBoostr allows a portion of the RAM to be assigned as a drive cache instead (I thought this is what the fetch stuff is meant to do?) so I set it to use half the RAM and it made quite a difference. Before stuff like mozilla and photoshop would use the hard drive a fair bit while loading, with the extra ram cache enabled they load instantly without touching the hard drive. Ive also noticed differences in loading times for games like company of heroes and world of warcraft, you can however set the cache to ignore certain folders (since games tend to fill it quite fast).
Im not sure I even need an SSD if this carries on working fine, the only bit I would miss out on is the faster boot times since this loads after windows.
It would be nice if some others could try the current beta to see if it makes much difference for them as well. Also, sorry if this comes across as a sales spam post
I don't often find programs like this which are actually useful.
http://www.eboostr.com
Old Toshiba 5200-902 with windows xp, cann't upgrade to vista or w7 due to odd hardware configuration and its max memory is 1GB. I upgraded the internal hard drive to a 40GB 7200rpm drive quite some time ago, but due to the small capacity it only gets about 20MB/s throughput at best. The laptop does however have USB2 ports (should be able to get about 40MB/s out of these) and sure enough, using a 2GB fast pendrive cuts the loadtime of stuff like mozilla and outlook express in half.
The second computer is a newer i7 system with 6GB ram, I was hoping to get a SSD for this after a month or so, but since the prices have rocketed I am stuck with a 1TB drive instead for the moment. Apart from the odd time in photoshop, most the ram is going to waste, even when running games it probably peaks at around 3GB used. eBoostr allows a portion of the RAM to be assigned as a drive cache instead (I thought this is what the fetch stuff is meant to do?) so I set it to use half the RAM and it made quite a difference. Before stuff like mozilla and photoshop would use the hard drive a fair bit while loading, with the extra ram cache enabled they load instantly without touching the hard drive. Ive also noticed differences in loading times for games like company of heroes and world of warcraft, you can however set the cache to ignore certain folders (since games tend to fill it quite fast).
Im not sure I even need an SSD if this carries on working fine, the only bit I would miss out on is the faster boot times since this loads after windows.
It would be nice if some others could try the current beta to see if it makes much difference for them as well. Also, sorry if this comes across as a sales spam post
I don't often find programs like this which are actually useful.http://www.eboostr.com
