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Vista’s ReadyBoost benefits on your Windows XP machine with eBoostr

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Darwin:
Curt - you outed me! I gave this another shot and have been running eBoostr for almost a week now. I am definitely seeing some improvement in my system when I put it under stress and have more or less sorted out the boot problem. As I note in Ron's thread, I'm just dithering about purchasing it. The resource "hit" is negligible...

Tinman57:
  I'll put it this way, I'm on an XP SP2 machine with only 512 mb of RAM and a 80 gb hard drive.  I'm running a large firewall, antivirus, several port sniffers, AvantBrowser, connection software, MemTurbo4, Slickrun, Magic Defrag, INCD, Creative 3D Audio, and I can't tell you how many other "little" associated apps in the background, and right now I have 292 mb of free RAM available, and that's actual chip memory.  If I did a quick refresh, I'd probably get about 312 mb or more of free'd RAM.  My Current File Cache is 32 mb and my Total Pagefile has 855 mb free.  Before using MemTurbo, I couldn't run all this stuff in the background without bogging down......  I think I'll stick with MemTurbo for quite a while.....

f0dder:
Free RAM is wasted RAM.

What applications like MemTurbo does is force all applications to swap out their stuff to the paging file. This involves disk I/O, and disk I/O is slow. Windows itself also swaps out to the paging file (duh! :)) but on a as-needed basis, instead of just dumping everything.

I have yet to see a quantified benchmark that shows that "memory optimizers" actually work, all I've seen yet is people's subjective feelings, and they try to justify their claims with "task manager shows more memory is free!", without even really understanding the shown stats.

I used XPSP2 on a 512meg machine for quite a while too, btw, and for heavy things like software development, and it ran okay without any snake oil apps. Moving to a gig did do wonders though, and was cheap - and is even cheaper nowadays.

Tinman57:
  Gee, too bad you had to waste all that money on more RAM.  Sorry about your luck.  Sure am glad I didn't have to.
  MemTurbo cured my problems long ago.  MemTurbo goes well beyond cache swapping, heck I don't need a program to change those, it's right in the sytem properties unless you have them hidden.  It also contols system and application priorities, boosting some when needed.  But if you already know so much about MemTurbo, I suppose I don't need to tell you anymore.....

f0dder:
I didn't waste money on RAM, it was well spent. Even with the dirty flush-to-pagefile tricks of apps like MemTurbo, you only have so much physical memory in your box. More RAM means I can set up large ramdrives when I need _really_ fast file operations, that I can use a lot of memory for filesystem cache without worrying, and that I can process huge files in-memory without swapping to disk.

Granted, the memory cost me more than the $30 MemTurbo does, but the net effect is so much better.

If I needed process priority boosting/decaying I'd use mouser's (free!) tool, but since I have a dual-core processor, I don't.

If you subjectively feel that MemTurbo works, good for you, it would be sad if you wasted money on snake oil and it tasted bitter.

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