The drive is fine - it is a pretty good one. It is about 25 times faster in access time than your HDD would be. The data transfer rate is of lesser importance because we are here talking about very little pieces of data. But have a look into your Resource Monitor (as explained in the linked post above) and see whether it is really worth bying the Ready Boost overhead. I doubt it.
I started to run the test with ReadyBoost disabled, but can't seem to find the means to do so. The help guide says to do this on the ReadyBoost tab of General Options, which I assume is within the Properties of the drive, but when I do this within a file manager, or within Disk Management, there is no ReadyBoost tab available. Where do I find this?
---------- Post added at 03:49 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:44 PM ----------
I understand what you are saying about the Resource Monitor, but you didn't comment on my question regarding alphanumeric's statement about boot time improvement. It would seem that may be a separate issue, which wouldn't be apparent in the Resource Monitor.
alphanumeric's statement about boot time improvement is a complete mystery to me. I have no clue how that could possibly happen. In fact it should be slower because the system has to deal with 2 paging devices. So you got me there.
If you want to improve your boot time, get a SSD. My system boots in 15 seconds. In fact my BIOS phase is longer than my boot.
SSD is on the horizon, but still at some distance until I find one that I want and can afford. In the mean time, I was hoping to milk ReadyBoost for a while. Considering your statements and my observations, I'm beginning to wonder what ReadyBoost is good for, except promoting flash drive sales? I suppose that some people might find it an improvement, if the demands of their apps exceed the RAM's capability, but then I would wonder about that, if the virtual memory would have to be used to capacity before ReadyBoost kicked in.
Originally, I thought that ReadyBoost would act as an increase in physical RAM, or at the very least an extension of the pagefile, not as a secondary one, but from what I have been able to see as to memory values as given by Windows, I was wrong.
EDIT: Thinking about this, I think that I got it reversed, Readyboost would be first in line, before the virtual memory, otherwise there would be no advantage in the speed increase. I think that I will try it with the pagefile disabled and see what happens(or would that also disable paging to ReadyBoost)?
Last edited by seekermeister; 17 Feb 2010 at 17:27.
Had I not been so hasty, your post would have been of greater benefit, because it seems that something was needed by the pagefiile, because the reboot required after doing that, was not sucessful. I shutdown and pulled the flash drive and used the launch repair utility, which got me to desktop, but the boot hangs was just as when the flash drive was installed. Now to reenable the pagefile and see what happens.
EDIT: Hmm, apparently the launch repair automatically reenabled it on it's own.
I've done a couple more reboots since last posting, and the hang delays still remain, even though I disabled everything on the Startup tab of msconfig. This seems to leave only two possibilities, either some part of ReadyBoost remains enabled in the OS, or the delays are caused by some driver problems. Since the problem began with ReadyBoost, that seems more likely to be the cause, but since I can't rule out coincidence, I ran Autoruns, to see what I might find.
I do not find anything that is obviously related to ReadyBoost, but there is so many possibilities listed, I thought that the Boot Execute tab would be the place to start. However, there are only two items listed....O&O Defrag, which has been there for a while and is among those disabled previously in msconfig, and an item named "Auto Check Utility". What is this for?
Since I know that there are many drivers loaded during boot, not listed on the Boot Execute tab, How should one determine which to disable for troubleshooting purposes? Obviously, one can't disable them all, like in msconfig, otherwise the system is certain not to boot.
EDIT: I found the definition of Auto Check Utility:
Auto check utility. Run automatically by the system at boot to check disks.
but it sounds as though this is a standard function on boot, so I don't know what would happen if I disabled it?
Auto chkdsk will run if it detects any possible hard drive issues. That's fine. As for the drivers, try a clean boot, the link is in the troubleshooting guide in my sig. Honestly, your performance would have increased with another stick of RAM. 2GB is not enough for 7, no matter what Microsoft says.
Try the following. Set Superfetch (in services) to "manual" and see whether that helps.
I would not subscribe to that. I have run Win7 in 1GB and it ran quite nicely.2GB is not enough for 7
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