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

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Lashiec:
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

Darwin:
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.

Lashiec:
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 :)

f0dder:
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.

Darwin:
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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