vista memory boost

jaybd

jaybd

jaybd

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29 Jan 2006
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139
just a quickie i have 3 gigs of ram in my machine which is vista 32bit i also have a 4 gig usb stick that i use to transfer files from 1 pc to another, would i notice much difference if i used the usb memory as a booster on vista ?

cheers
 
jaybd said:
just a quickie i have 3 gigs of ram in my machine which is vista 32bit i also have a 4 gig usb stick that i use to transfer files from 1 pc to another, would i notice much difference if i used the usb memory as a booster on vista ?

cheers
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Very little if any at all.

I have 4GB on mine - 32 bit Vista home premium, my readyboost usb stick seems to make 0% difference.
 
Readyboost is only useful when you have a small amount of ram. With 3 gigs it wont do anything since it is a lot slower then the ram you have.
 
Readyboost is also very useful if you turn your PC off and on a lot, however as most people don't understand what readyboost does, they tend to claim it doesn't do anything because they are looking at the wrong things.
 
Readyboost is a passive thing that helps in the long term, if you have a system which has been using readyboost for several weeks and you were to pull out the memory stick I think the user would notice their system behaving differently. Most benchmarks I've seen compare things like FPS in games which has nothing to do with the purpose of Readyboost.
 
Microsoft really should have made it clear on the ReadyBoost setup screen that it can take several weeks for performance increases to occur...

Otherwise people just think "oh I wonder what this does :rolleyes:" in a very sceptical way... try it out for 10 minutes and then decide that nothing has improved and then turn it off again.
 
Dolph said:
Readyboost is also very useful if you turn your PC off and on a lot, however as most people don't understand what readyboost does, they tend to claim it doesn't do anything because they are looking at the wrong things.
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I hope that I am not being classified as one of these peope.
 
superplay said:
I hope that I am not being classified as one of these peope.
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That depends on what sort of testing you've done and what improvements you expect readyboost to give. It does work very well at what it's supposed to do, when given enough time to learn the usage style and so on.
 
I do exactly know how this works and yes on paper (Microsoft whitepapers, architecture diagrams etc) and some reports from some reputable web sites makes it sound as if it makes a 512MB system go like the clappers.

I tested ready boost over a long period on several incarnations of the OS Beta/RC and final versions of Vista on systems with different types of USB drives / readyboost sizes in different system with different amounts of RAM.

In MY testing I only noticed minimal improvements when applications loaded and did not really notice any increase on a 512MB system as there was so much disk trashing going on (paging) due to lack of system RAM. As for booting I did not really notice any difference. During the tests at one point I did look at perfmon counters however these were a little sporadic to monitorig as to gain some hard facts about % gains of readyboost over time, paging on perfmon was still high.

When 512MB test systems were upgraded to 1GB of RAM the performance of the general system did increase dramatically (as expected)

At the time I concluded that £ for £ that the better gain on a 512MB system was RAM rather than Readyboost and besides my testing it was well docuemented that systems with 1GB or more of RAM would see a diminished benifit from Readyboost.
 
A 512MB system is going to be slow on Vista regardless of ReadyBoost TBH. ReadyBoost isn't a RAM supplement - anyone that thinks it is doesn't understand it. ReadyBoost is all about aiding Superfetch (that other cool feature in Vista which speeds up your system...)

superplay said:
During the tests at one point I did look at perfmon counters however these were a little sporadic to monitorig as to gain some hard facts about % gains of readyboost over time, paging on perfmon was still high.
Click to expand...

Sorry but this suggests to me that you actually don't know how ReadyBoost works... :)
 
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