Best Ready Boost media to use.

Actually my laptop died, but being it's a thinkpad (best laptops ever), by the time it died (fault of nVidia, not lenovo), the secondary markets were flooded with corp trade ins, so I was able to get a good used system board very cheap.

I also found that the 4GB ram limit didn't exist, the machine gladly accepted 8GB. There were no 4GB sodimms when it was designed, so the listed the max as 4GB 2x2GB.

I also installed 2GB of Intel Turbo memory. I think this should be far superior to readyboast. I had 1GB turbo mem installed before, but had the SATA controller set to compatibility mode so it was crippling the turbo rams effectiveness.

I also found a 3rd party bios to enable SATA support, so this machine is running a lot smoother. I can now have multiple browswers open with multiple flash games without it acting stupid and having flash crash on me.

I'm looking forward to getting an SSD drive too, but I don't think the technology is ready. A drive with no moving parts should have zero errors and pretty much every SSD I've seen has some bad reviews.

I think in a year or so the new SSDs will work without any chance of error, at least for several years. The Hybrid drives have even worse reputation. I think the firmware that desides whhat to store in ssd is faulty, and a hybrid will only work if a user knows how to configure it for their behavior, like specifying what files to store in solidstate, and what one's not to. Software can't seem to do this efficiently and it ends up making the drivers slower, and they fail with corrput data.

My laptop has 3GB of RAM (256MB is used by the on-board video, so only 2816MB is actually available to Windows).
Since I have a Sandisk 4GB SDHC laying around, I went ahead and dedicated it to ReadyBoost for a few days (using the internal Realtek USB2.0 card reader).

I have seen a very slight difference, apps opening and working just a bit smoother, or so it seemed. It was hardly noticeable though.
So, from personal experience I'd say it's definitely not worth it with 4GB of physical RAM or even just 3GB of it.

Corazon said:

My laptop has 3GB of RAM (256MB is used by the on-board video, so only 2816MB is actually available to Windows).
Since I have a Sandisk 4GB SDHC laying around, I went ahead and dedicated it to ReadyBoost for a few days (using the internal Realtek USB2.0 card reader).

I have seen a very slight difference, apps opening and working just a bit smoother, or so it seemed. It was hardly noticeable though.
So, from personal experience I'd say it's definitely not worth it with 4GB of physical RAM or even just 3GB of it.

If your running a 32bit OS, you should consider upgrading if your system supports it. 3GB is barely enough to have fun these days in my opinion.

If your stuck with 32bit, there are versions of windows server that allow massive amounts of ram. Server 03 datacenter allows 64GB on the 32bit version, server 08 I think allows 512GB in 32bit.

Some older machines have hardware limitations on ram too, so check that before planning any upgrades.

Thanks. :) But my desktop motherboard is indeed limited to 4GB of total RAM, on my laptop it simply isn't that important (it's kinda slow overall anyway, being a rather basic model).

Once I get a whole new computer I'll definitely go the 64-bit route. But that'll be a while yet...I'm not exactly rich

Not sure - I think it's a class-4 card? (The label shows a 4 in a circle.) The card can do about 12MB/sec writing and 17MB/sec reading.
But again, I simply wanted to make the point that with more than 2GB of RAM in your computer, ReadyBoost won't do very much for you.

yeah i think so.because i have an 8 gb ram and i still dedicate 8gb via lacie moskeyto and 8 gb via sandisk ultra, thats 16gb *2 (because of the compression/encryption) and noticed some boost.

yeah i think also, because of superfetch/readyboost make my system snappier. give some 5 mins after booting and cache builds up in the ram, i monitor also that my readyboost drives randomly read and write.