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

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Darwin:
Alright, alright already... Yes. I agree. Curiosity kills the cat. Consider me a cat with a deathwish!

I couldn't help myself and have installed eboostr on my aging first generation centrino notebook (1.4Ghz, 2GB DDR PC2100 RAM, 120GB 5400 rpm harddrive) and am giving it a go. I set up three different caches on three different USB devices - two thumbdrives (394MB and 987MB respectively) and on my new USB 3.5" HD (4GB cache). So far I am not sure if I am experiencing the placebo effect or not... Certainly boot times are not affected as far as I can tell (though I *think* my desktop icons paint a wee bit qucker, but I need more observations) but general operation does *seem* brisker. Currently, I am runnig Word (all Office apps are 2003 Sp-3) with 5 documents open, Excel with 1 spreadsheet open, Endnote X, Maxthon 2.06 with 12 tabs open, Dopus 9.1 with two panes showing, no preveiws and no additional tabs loaded, Outlook and Powerpoint with three presentation open, one of which is 17MB (haven't optimized the graphics yet). I should stress that I was able to do this with minimal drama WITHOUT eboostr installed and set up, but I am certain that my machine bogged down a bit more than it is at the moment.

It's early days yet, but I think I'll give this a couple of days. I AM concerned about wear on my thumbdrives and on the external HD, though... Will report back when I have more to tell you all.

Darwin:
Update: it's gone. I spent the afternoon and evening playing around with eboostr doing its thing and, er, not doing its thing (that's a LOT of rebooting!) and concluded that my boot times were actually longer with it installed - explorer.exe goes nuts and all but freezes up for quite a while after my desktop loads rendering my taskbar, system tray, and start menu inaccessble - and there is no real difference in terms of stability or "peppiness" that I can perceive when loading and running applications. YMMV - I'm running 2GB of RAM, if you have 1GB or less this may well be the electronic equivalent of sliced bread.

lanux128:
just noticed this but as i read about this program. i'm reminded of Ram-boosting programs of yesteryears, which took advantage of high prices of RAM sticks.. anyway, the program claims to have "smart caching mechanism" which seems to be a euphemism for swap-disk/virtual ram kind of technology.

lanux128:
this is the program i had in mind, check out this article.


• http://www.ddj.com/184409937?pgno=3

f0dder:
The site does look like the typical snake oil site, offering very little information of what it really does. If it simply does a "disk cache on disk", well, who cares. You'd need a really fast disk to store the cache on, and then you'd be better off putting that disk in your system instead. But it sure does have pretty icons.

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