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Main Area and Open Discussion => General Software Discussion => Topic started by: a_lunatic on December 11, 2007, 12:52 PM
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Hi all has anyone seen this or willing to try it out looks good if it can support both USB and non-USB removable media devices, as well as additional hard disks & up to 4 devices.
Am going to try it out later once I find some time but hope some of you can put it through some tests as well to find out if its really worth it.
eBoostr™ allows you to use an additional drive (flash memory or hard disk) as another layer of performance-boosting cache for your Windows XP®. There is no need to purchase a Vista upgrade to get the benefits of the Vista’s ReadyBoost® technology. With the newly developed eBoostr™, the booting of your OS and applications startup get much faster thanks to the smart caching mechanism.
* Vista’s ReadyBoost benefits on your Windows XP® machine;
* Smart caches frequently used applications and files for maximum performance speed up;
* Supports both USB and non-USB removable media devices, as well as additional hard disks;
* Allows up to 4 devices for simultaneous smart caching;
* Cache file size of up to 4GB on each device;
* Compatible with all ReadyBoost® ready devices.
http://www.eboostr.com/
The eBoostr™ trial version has no time expiration and you can evaluate it for as long as you wish. However the product demo is fully functional only for 4 hours after each system boot. This will allow you to evaluate the product and estimate how it performs on your configuration.
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Hmm... could be interesting. I'm going to look into this myself as this is one aspect of Vista about which I have been curious.
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My understanding is that the booster technology is of benefit only if you're borderline low on RAM... correct?
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I'm reading a couple of reviews (first one says that there is no discrenible change in performance) and some more comprehensive descriptions of what eboostr "does". Can't say that any of it makes much sense to me (ie I can't see how this will work to improve system performance).
At any rate, Ron Schenone is just embarking on a two week trial here: http://www.lockergnome.com/blade/author/blade/
I'll be watching that space closely to see how he fares.
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Ralf, this is one of the questions that I have about this technology as well... Ron Schenone is testing it with a gig of RAM; the other review I found (they're few and far between) stated was also running a gig...
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PS Techspot (http://www.techspot.com/news/27874-eboostr-claims-readyboostlike-functionality-for-xp.html) has this to say about ReadyBoost:
It has been highly debated whether Vista's ReadyBoost actually works to speed up your system or is it an empty feature with a nice name. During a set of informal tests we performed prior to posting our Windows Vista Memory Tweak Guide we saw a noticeable increase in system response when ReadyBoost was used on systems with 1GB or less RAM, furthermore we saw an advantage of using it on laptops that generally come equipped with slower hard drives.
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My other concern would be that it's raping the USB drive. Those things really aren't meant to be used for random access storage; the flash memory would wear out pretty quick. Unless things have changed dramatically in flash RAM technology...?
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Here's a thread at neowin (http://www.neowin.net/news/main/07/11/14/readyboost-no-longer-a-vista-only-feature-eboostr-10) that goes into some detail about this. Conclusion? Bogus.
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Most tests I saw say that ReadyBoost only brings advantages (and not that much, mind you) with 1 GB of RAM or less. Considering the price of a 1 GB stick of DDR2 RAM these days, I encourage buying one and call it a day.
Using this method requires: a) A fast USB drive, with enough capacity, and b) A registered version of the program to do something. Considering the cost of both combined, I think you can find cheaper RAM easily.
On a completely different topic, Darwin, congratulations for your 3000 messages :Thmbsup:
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Thanks Lashiec! I've been reading what I can about eboostr and opinions vary dramatically. I get the impression that *if* you have less than a gig of RAM and you've already a fast USB 2 thumbdrive this might be an alternative to increasing your RAM. Beyond that, most people seem to think that it's snake oil. I'd give it a shot but with 2GB of RAM and no complaints whatsoever WRT my system's performance I'd rather wait to see some conclusive results first!
PS I did find this review at OS9user (http://www.os9user.blogspot.com/2007/11/how-to-speed-up-windows-firefox-very.html), though, that also recommends Process Tamer :Thmbsup:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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this is the program i had in mind, check out this article (http://www.ddj.com/184409937?pgno=3).
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• http://www.ddj.com/184409937?pgno=3
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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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It reminds me of Autopilot (http://www.wugnet.com/shareware/spow.asp?ID=528) - anyone remember that? Sunbelt was selling it for awhile. Here's a short thread that sound quite familar: http://my.opera.com/lounge/forums/topic.dml?id=90094
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I too remember when these "RAM boosters" came on the scene.
I think their appeal was not just that RAM prices were high, but that disk compression was a hot technology at the time. Stacker, et al had made a splash, and eventually MS even bundled disk compression into Windows 95.
So consumers knew that disk compression worked and were comfortable with using it. RAM boosters were based on the idea that if you can compress data on the fly and effectively double the capacity of your hard disk, why shouldn't you be able to do the same with your RAM? This seems like a logical conclusion, even to a fairly savvy consumer. The technical barriers to this working were probably lost on most computer users, and perhaps even on some of the people who developed this kind of software.
This does seem like a similar situation, although to me the answer is "it's the bus, stupid!" The flash memory used in USB Drives may be faster than (some) hard drives in the abstract, but the speed of the USB2 bus ultimately limits their performance. So it's probably unlikely that flash RAM caching is faster or better than plain ol' disk caching in most modern machines, even leaving aside the wear and tear on the flash drive.
I think the appeal of this feature is actually simplicity. Most computer owners are still ignorant (or even deathly afraid) of the insides of their PC. Sticking a "RAM stick" into an external port must seem like a far safer and easier way to "upgrade your RAM" than opening up the box and dealing with all those scary circuit-board thingies.
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Another attraction has been highlighted elsewhere, but bears repeating: if you have a notebook and have maxed out the RAM and are unable to update the CPU, ezboostr seems to be promising a performance increase. My experience, as highlighted above, is that once you get over the "placebo effect" the performance gains, if any, are negligible and may in fact represent a net loss. Still, I am curious to read more commentary from users more savvy than me. I'll be following developments out of curiousity and bloody-mindedness (READ: my notebook is maxed out with RAM and I can't update the CPU... ;D).
I'm particularly keen to read the results of Ron Schenone's two week trial (http://www.lockergnome.com/blade/2007/12/11/ready-boost-for-windows-xp-eboostr/).
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Just outta perverse curiosity, has anyone tried yanking out the USB drive when Vista's using it to ReadyBoost? What happens to Windows?
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Perverse, but compelling, Ralf! I'd be interested as well. If it wasn't for the twin facts that I no longer have ezboostr installed and that the USB drives that I was using all contained additional data (probably not a smart move, in hindsight), I'd be up for giving this a shot... Hopefully someone using either Vista or ezboostr will post with a "result". I can't imagine that it would be a very pleasant result, though - something bad's gotta happen!
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This does seem like a similar situation, although to me the answer is "it's the bus, stupid!" The flash memory used in USB Drives may be faster than (some) hard drives in the abstract, but the speed of the USB2 bus ultimately limits their performance. So it's probably unlikely that flash RAM caching is faster or better than plain ol' disk caching in most modern machines, even leaving aside the wear and tear on the flash drive.
-Jimdoria
Negative, USB2 has 480mbit/s bandwidth, and while you cannot get it all dedicated to a single device, I've been able to pull at least 35mbyte/s to an external usb2 drive. The flash pendrives are slow compared to harddrives, and even their random access time isn't that hot, unless you buy the slightly more expensive models.
Dunno if it's the controller chips they use on the pendrives, or the memory itself... but I guess there's a reason an 8gig pendrive is cheaper than an 8gig solid-state disk :)
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My other concern would be that it's raping the USB drive. Those things really aren't meant to be used for random access storage; the flash memory would wear out pretty quick. Unless things have changed dramatically in flash RAM technology...?
-Ralf Maximus
yeah they have modern flash ram can keep running for a very long time, wikipedia concurs:
With these mechanisms in place, some industry analysts[1] have calculated that flash memory can be written to at full speed continuously for 51 years before exceeding its write endurance, even if such writes frequently cause the entire memory to be overwritten. This figure (51 years) involved a worst-case scenario using specific data parameters and should not be confused with a particular "shelf life" for a flash memory device. The bottom line is that a typical user using a commercial device, such as a camera, with a flash drive will probably not wear out the memory for the effective life of the camera.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory
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I have tried many many "boosters" over the years but with poor success. Mostly they're a bunch of hype. Then I discovered MemTurbo 4. It's a very configurable cache manager, RAMbooster, and process handler program that has considerably improved performance on my 2.8 ghz XP computer. But it isn't freeware, it's commercial. $19.95
MemTurbo™ 4 for Windows 98, Me, 2000, XP and 2003
http://www.memturbo.com/?referrer=SOREF_NOTAVAIL®VER=1&btnsource=M4-memw1-mt
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I have tried many many "boosters" over the years but with poor success. Mostly they're a bunch of hype. Then I discovered MemTurbo 4. It's a very configurable cache manager, RAMbooster, and process handler program that has considerably improved performance on my 2.8 ghz XP computer. But it isn't freeware, it's commercial. $19.95-Tinman57
It's cache tuning might work, but I suspect all that does is tweak registry settings (some of which only worked on Win9x), and which there are freeware apps for doing anyway. it's "memory boosting technology" aka RAM freeing is snake oil, discussed many times before.
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And the verdict (http://www.lockergnome.com/blade/2007/12/26/ready-boost-for-xp-eboostr-reviewed/):
One of the things that is mentioned on the eBoostr site is how the software may improve performance for those using a laptop system, which I used to perform my testing on. However, my system has 1G of RAM using Windows XP and I really didn’t notice much of a performance boost. This does not indicate that eBoostr didn’t work. But as mentioned in the comments, eBoostr may be used best on systems with either 256MB or 512MB of RAM, running programs such as Photoshop that tax the system.
Guess what? I have such a system. My wife’s laptop has 512MB and she also runs Photoshop at times. So I gave eBoostr a try on her system. I noted that there was a marked improvement using a 2G USB stick when running Photoshop. The system rendered changes to photo’s she was working with much quicker and there was less hard disk activity. In fact most of the time there was no hard disk activity. :-)
So what does this prove?
eBoostr does work on systems with low on board RAM using taxing programs such as Photoshop.
It also provides an easy way to increase performance without having to open the case. This is particularly attractive for laptop users.
So what is better? Using eBoostr or actually installing more physical RAM?
I’d personal recommend adding more physical RAM. But if cracking open the case, especially a laptop intimates you, than eBoostr is a definite alternative.
http://www.lockergnome.com/blade/2007/12/26/ready-boost-for-xp-eboostr-reviewed/-Ron Schenone
It seems this program may be the thing for me and my 448 MB available RAM... :up:
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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...
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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.....
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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.
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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.....
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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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I'm confused, you prefer swapping to more memory? With the current price of memory??!! :o
The priority is only useful in certain scenarios, I'll tell you I played with priorities in my old machine, and didn't see any improvement at all. Maybe if you're a heavy multitasker, with lots of demanding applications running in the background (like desktop search) it makes some difference, but I'm a man of a single desktop ;)
EDIT: w00t! 2¹° posts :D
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I gave up on memory optimizers as well (and I purchased at least two dedicated optimizers, along with CachemanXP). All things being equal, if you can expand your RAM, that's the best solution. I still have CachemanXP installed on my system but only to use it to tweak my cache - I have the memory recovery disabled because I don't want it going near my RAM. Having said this, there are times when it may be justifiable to use these software solutions and that's when you're dealing with bios limitations that won't allow you to install anymore RAM. However, even when I only ran 512MB of RAM on a Win2k notebook (RAM was maxed at this point), I discovered that it ran just fine when I didn't obsess about the amount of RAM that was free on it. I noticed that if I turned off the memory optimizer (and thus had no visual cue in my taskbar about the amount free) and disciplined myself NOT to keep invoking task manager to check my RAM, that my machine ran just fine. Every couple of weeks it would occur to me to check at a point when all was well but when I had a lot of processes running and I'd be surprised to find that I might have only 35MB free! Now that I have 2GB RAM on my current - though now elderly - notebook, I never even think about it. I've just checked and I've got 1.2GB free. The "old me" would be fretting about the fact that I only booted my computer an hour ago and have only Outlook and Maxthon open, so where'd my 800MB of memory go?! The "new me" couldn't care less.
As tinman notes, YMMV. This is my experience: there's a significant placebo effect with RAM optimizers. I've found that once you stop worrying about the amount of RAM that is free it becomes a non-issue so that the RAM optimizer simply isn't necesary.
EDIT: add last sentence.
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Exactly. Besides, Windows XP handles the swapping quite better than Win9x. You need more RAM? OK, Windows will swap some data to the pagefile, and you'll get that extra RAM you need. The only point you'll want to have as much free RAM as possible is after a cold start, because more free RAM -> less programs loaded at startup -> faster startup! :D
I'd say that there's no need to fiddle with anything, including the cache. I tested CachemanXP some months ago, just because I used Cacheman extensively in the past to tweak Windows 98 settings, and I didn't found anything that led me to fork money for it, it was much less useful than the normal Cacheman, yet it was payware. I think I'll pass, thank you :)
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Exactly, Darwin - those "memory optimizers" are written for people who obsess about free memory, without realizing how futile this is. And most of those "optimizers" use the horrid hack of allocating a huge chunk of memory to do the paging out to disk, instead of iterating over running processes and calling SetProcessWorkinSetSize() to trim the processes (which is imho still bad, but a little less crappy).
I dunno how effective it is to hand-tune the various cache settings, but the single LargeSystemCache=1 flag works great when you have enough RAM (why be so conservative about filesystem caching? Tsk!). Unless of course you have ATI drivers. Oh, and disabling NTFS last-access (not last-modify) is also very nice.
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Heh, heh, thanks guys :Thmbsup: I'm using CachemanXP because I bought it back when I was running the Win2k machine with 512MB of RAM (it sits in a bag in my closet because I stepped on it a few months ago and cracked the lcd :'(). When I upgraded to 2GB RAM on my newer notebook I thought "What the heck, I'll use it to tweak the cache settings, which is what I've done. More than likely, it's simply applied one or more of the suggestions that you have made. I'll investigate...
Now... to eBoostr. I'm still running it and still feel that it improves that stability of my system (placebo?!). I picked up a 4GB Kingston DataTraveller (upper middle of the pack for speed AFAICT) for $25 in the boxing day sales and am using it, 4GB of a 40GB USB powered drive with nothing else on it, and 4GB of my 500GB external backup harddrive with eBoostr. I don't believe that eBoostr is speeding up my boot times - in fact I suspect that my boottimes are somewhat slower now - but I do feel that when running a number of heavy programs concurrently my system is more stable with eBoostr than without. I'd prefer to install more RAM, but I've already got double the supposedly maximum amount of RAM that my notebook will support AND 1.5GB SODIMMS are too expensive to take a chance with. I've not really noticed much difference when running one, two, or three caches (as outlined above) and have written to the developer asking for clarification on what the advantages of running multiple caches are, if any. I'm waiting for a response to that e-mail. I've already had a response to a number of recommendations that I've made, and they hope to incorporate one or more of them into the next version (1.2, I presume). They've also acknowledged that the documentation needs to be improved and have promised that it will be forthcoming.
Anyone else actually taken the plunge and tried this?
Placebo-boy :o
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Just to clarify a point I made in my post about RAM optimization (and to anticipate a question or two) - in addition to simply disabling the icon in the system tray that reported how much RAM I had available, I also disabled automatic RAM recovery. After I had "survived" like this for a couple of months I simply uninstalled the RAM optimizer and never looked back. At this point I had been running Tenebril's MemoryBoost (I recall having gotten fed up with CachemanXP's habit of failing to report the amount of RAM free correctly. Wish I'd run the above experiment BEFORE paying for another RAM boosting application :-[).
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What type of solution do you all use for RamDisk's? I've seen this mentioned in this thread a couple of times and am interested in setting one up.
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Hm, as for eBoostr - I really wish they'd write a little about what the program is actually doing... it's too much marketing fluff and too little hard info right now for me to even consider installing the application. Is it any better than adding multiple paging files, does it use a filter driver, etc etc etc?
Josh: there isn't much difference between the RAM disks I've seen for NT. Most of them are relatively lame, I haven't seen any that can do things like dynamic resizing :(. I'm tempted to have a go at writing one myself, but I don't have the free time.
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Yes, the information on eBoostr that is available is pretty much nil. Once you install it and setup a cache, you can explore the cache, which would give you some clues as to what it does. Sort of reminds of prefetching on steroids. Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to interpret it (no idea, in other words)! I can post a screenshot, if anyone is interested...
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... Oh, and disabling NTFS last-access (not last-modify) is also very nice.
-f0dder
:Thmbsup: Thanks muchly for the tip. (I also ended up setting "NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation" to 1)
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... Oh, and disabling NTFS last-access (not last-modify) is also very nice.
-f0dder
:Thmbsup: Thanks muchly for the tip. (I also ended up setting "NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation" to 1)
-Tyinsar
Disabling 8dot3 creation can be dangerous if you run any 16-bit applications... and chances are you might do, even if you think you don't; for some reason, 32bit versions of InstallShield kept using 16bit installers for a long, long time.
But thanks for reminding me of this setting, considering that I run 64bit XP now and can't even run 16bit apps anymore, I might as well disable 8dot3 myself :) - dunno if does much difference performance wise, though.
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Yeah, I read the warnings but thought I'd give it a shot anyway. If there are any issues I think I can fix them. I'm installing XP 64 very soon anyway.
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New eBoostr 2
eBoostr 2 Released
April 16th, 2008 |
What’s new in version 2 -
Here goes a quick list of the additional features with more details "below (http://www.eboostr.com/news/eboostr-2-released/)":
Memory caching (if you have plenty of RAM installed);
Exclude list (the most requested feature);
Power saving mode;
More than 4GB cache file size (on NTFS file system only);
One flash drive use on different computers;
Unlimited number of files in cache;
Build cache process improvement (including initial statistics used from XP prefetch information);
Load balancing mechanism improvements;
And many small fixes and enhancements;
And finally 16 new languages added: Portuguese, Ukrainian, Finnish, Czech, Danish, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Polish, Korean, Swedish, Sinhalese, Lithuanian, Arabic, Belarusian, Japanese and Thai.-eBoostr
I have been using it for 3 days, and have a small improvement in performance
- I did not try the first version.
http://www.eboostr.com/news/eboostr-2-released/
Select your license type Price (USD) Price (EUR) Price (GBP)
PRO Version:
Includes all available functionality: RAM cache, exclude list, cache viewer, power saving mode, up to 4 devices.
$39 €26 £20
Laptop Edition:
Includes: battery saving mode, exclude list, cache viewer, up to 4 devices. No RAM caching functionality.
$29 €19 £15 -
Desktop Edition:
Includes: exclude list, cache viewer, up to 4 devices. No RAM caching and power save mode.
$24 €16 £12
Lite Version:
Limited to single USB thumb drive. Does not contain cache viewer and exclude list functionality.
$19 €13 £10
- I now know from experience that the prices are plus VAT
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I recently came across a tool called SweepRAM (http://88.191.26.34/computers_are_fun/sweepram/), which is free that aims to do something different : - It tries to allocate as much memory as it can to running applications and then then releases it.
It goes through all running processes and ask for them to be put out of RAM (into VM). When that happens, of course they’ll get right back there, but only as little as they actually need to as that time; meaning, after that they will only use as much RAM as they actually need to for the time being.
I've placed a shortcut to it in my start menu and the results are okay, but there is an annoying window that pops up saying that the task is done each time I run the program. There's apparently a way to run it with a /s parameter that suppresses this, but I'm not sure how.
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icekin: actually, that application does not try to "allocate as much memory as it can to running applications and then then releases it." - instead (afaik), it goes through all running processes, and does SetWorkingProcessSetSize(process, -1, -1), which tells windows to "trim that process".
Much less non-lame than "allocate as much memory as possible", but still a pretty silly thing to do - it doesn't really help you... if windows needs more memory, it will do this trimming automatically. Remember: unused memory is wasted memory. And flushing things to the pagefile (and reading back from disk) is slow.