RAM disk on a 1GB netbook?

I have a netbook with a 160GB hard drive that shows a good SMART report. No bad sectors. Throughput is very decent at 50mb/s, but for some reason it has a very slow - on average 26.4ms - seek time. I did all I could to help it, and nothing changed anything. The performance of the netbook was quite bad.

Then I stumbled upon the Ram Disk concept. The unit only has 1GB of RAM, so I set 160mb of it as the virtual drive, and then I mapped the Windows 7 (Starter) %Temp% and %TMP% environmental directories to it. I also mapped IE's temp folder to the ram disk.

The difference is amazing most of the time. Here's my concern. What is going to happen if Windows needs to do a big job - say, installing a large .NET file or a service pack, or defragging the hard drive - and the TEMP folder is not big enough? Is there provision for overflow?

Thanks for any insight you can give

A ha. That's sounds right. The unit still has a pressure valve. Do you think 160GB is about the right balance for %TEMP% and cache duties? Thanks for your insight.

hmmm. That's pretty aggressive...

I'll be selling it, so I would have to set it up for plain vanilla use. They may well install a different browser that won't access the ram disk. This brings up a related issue - what does the browser do if it runs out of cache space?

Ok, thanks. I think I'll set up Chrome to cache there, as I have with Opera. I may up the limit a little too. Wish I could speed up the HDD, but this ram disk thing has a lot of potential, and was worth finding out about.

What is going to happen if Windows needs to do a big job - say, installing a large .NET file or a service pack, or defragging the hard drive - and the TEMP folder is not big enough? Is there provision for overflow?

If the size of the RAMDisk is inadequate for any requirements you will likely receive an out of disk space error and the operation will fail. Many applications do not cope well with such conditions. In many cases there is nothing that can be done except fail. There is no provision for an overflow. The size or configuration of the pagefile is not relevant.

Be aware that the use of a RAMDisk will impair overall system performance. With only 1 GB total RAM the impairment could be serious.