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

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Darwin:
It reminds me of Autopilot - 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

Jimdoria:
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.

Darwin:
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.

Ralf Maximus:
Just outta perverse curiosity, has anyone tried yanking out the USB drive when Vista's using it to ReadyBoost?  What happens to Windows?

Darwin:
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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