Thos Posted January 17, 2007 Report Share Posted January 17, 2007 Although I don't anticipate buying Vista for some while I have been reading about it and spotted a performance booster which intrigued me."Flash drives become even more handy with Vista. Plug one into your USB port and Vista will use the extra storage to increase your PC's RAM on the fly."I wonder whether those who have been trying Vista out prior to it's release have used this facility. And does it mean that if the PC's memory is causing Windows occasionally to run slowly, you can merely plug in a flash drive to remedy it?Thos. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scarecrow Man Posted January 17, 2007 Report Share Posted January 17, 2007 I am a bit unsure if this would actually work, since a Flash Drive uses a completly different type of memory than conventional RAM. It is also much slower, and would probably decrease the speed of your computer rather than increase it.The downside to flash RAM is that it's slower. Reading flash memory is slower, and writing to flash memory is MUCH slower. It works fine as a virtual disk drive because our expectations for a disk's speed are quite different than what we expect for system memory. In addition to the issue of the memory's own speed, there's also the USB interface to consider. As fast as it is for other purposes, it, too, is significantly slower than your system's main memory. So USB RAM sticks, memory sticks, key chain drives, geek sticks, whatever you call them, are great for portable data storage. But increasing your system's memory is an entirely different proposition. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dagwoood Posted January 18, 2007 Report Share Posted January 18, 2007 The use of a flash drive in Vista isn't really to increase your RAM but it acts as a cache for data that windows would call for from the hard drive. It learns your habits and will cache dll's and such that it anticipates that your going to use.You see more of a difference if you're system hasn't got a lot of RAM, ie 1GB or less. If you have 2GB of RAM then you wont see any performance increase. I didn't notice any at all to be honest. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thos Posted January 18, 2007 Author Report Share Posted January 18, 2007 Thank you both. I will bear your thoughts in mind if and when Vista becomes a part of my life.Thos. B) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tk27 Posted January 23, 2007 Report Share Posted January 23, 2007 Thank you both. I will bear your thoughts in mind if and when Vista becomes a part of my life.Thos. B)two things on that:usb drive has to have 256mb free and memtest won't check it for errors. as dagwoood said, cache operation/paging is where you'd benefit. so... buy 2gb of real fast access ram and you're fine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AlanHo Posted January 23, 2007 Report Share Posted January 23, 2007 When I saw the title of this thread - my mind went into overdrive - especially when I saw it was about the V word. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.