Simple and cheap way to speed up your computer

I wasnt at all aware of this until I ran into a youtube video about a week ago describing it, but even then I was slightly skeptical, but it does seem to work, and its based on solid principles.

One of the main reasons an older computer slows down is lack of RAM memory, so called "virtual memory". The usual method of dealing with this is to buy a RAM memory upgrade. But some times, with some computers, you must buy a pair of RAM memory boards, instead of just one like with other computers, and that makes it more expensive to replace, because you must buy 2 at a time. The cost of more memory can run from $25 for a small upgrade using the cheapest decent quality memory, but thats only if you install it yourself. If you hire someone to do it and you use memory made by the manufacturer of your computer, you can easily pay $200 or more for a more significant memory upgrade.

But this is a totally a do-it-yourself procedure that literally anyone can do in about 1-3 minutes or less. All you have to do is buy a USB flash drive at your local box department store, computer store, or even drug store, and when you plug it into your USB port, it can easily be configured to be used as a RAM memory supplement. If you buy a 4 gb or 8gb flash drive, you should be able to increase your RAM by 4gb to 8gb.

For instance, my 2008 computer has 2gb of memory, and although it had been more than adequate for all my tasks, recently I have noticed it slowing up a bit. So today I bought a 16gb USB flash drive to try this out. Even if it didnt work I can still get much use out of the flash drive as a backup or to transfer files or songs or whatever. So its a no-lose situation. My computer opened a window as soon as I installed the 16gb flash drive asking me if I wanted to use it as memory, and I clicked yes. It also gave me the option of how much of the space on the flash drive I wanted to dedicate to memory. I chose 3800MB(3.8gb). In other words, I nearly tripled the memory in my computer in 1 minute for $12. :thumbsup:

Even though my computer wasnt extremely slow, I did immediately notice a significant difference in how fast pages load, and there is no longer any wait time after bringing up a page before I can do whatever I'm doing.

Here's one of the youtube videos explaining how to do this, but in my case my computer did most of it for me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjERVK100Wc

You can do this with your HDD as well. As long as your HDD isn't packed with files some of that space can be allocated to be used as virtual memory. In fact, I think by default most Windows OS already allocate some space as virtual memory.

Of course, flash memory is faster in read/writing so it's up to you!

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Turn Off {uncheck} unnecessary 'Startup' Processes in msconfig within the Run bar
I have 4 things checked

also, used CCleaner often

orbital said:

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Turn Off unnecessary Startup 'Processes' in msconfig within the Run bar
I run 4 things checked

also, used CClearer often

Click to expand...

Yup, and if you install/delete/modify files on your computer often it's also good to defragment your HDD once in awhile.

Imon said:

You can do this with your HDD as well. As long as your HDD isn't packed with files some of that space can be allocated to be used as virtual memory. In fact, I think by default most Windows OS already allocate some space as virtual memory.

Of course, flash memory is faster in read/writing so it's up to you!

Click to expand...

Through USB2, a flash drive is significantly slower in outright throughput than a SATA HDD.

It does, however, have a massive advantage in latency, which is where you can gain some benefit.

I've used readyboost in the past with good results - for the money it is good value.

Nothing, however, comes close to lots of RAM, and a good quality SSD

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Teach yourself to Overclock your computer {if your bios allows}

....that can be 30% or more increase in computer performance for absolutely free


^^

Imon said:

You can do this with your HDD as well. As long as your HDD isn't packed with files some of that space can be allocated to be used as virtual memory. In fact, I think by default most Windows OS already allocate some space as virtual memory.

Of course, flash memory is faster in read/writing so it's up to you!

Click to expand...

The problem with using an HDD as virtual memory is the way windows uses the page file. Often Windows will page out the memory an application is using if you minimize it. Now if you go back to that application in a few minutes, you'll hear the hard drive thrashing while Windows puts that app back into RAM and pages out another minimized app. It seems whenever I've had a page file on hard disk I'm constantly listening to the hard drive thrash while the computer is non-responsive. I stopped using a page file once I had 1 GB of RAM and haven't looked back. My present machine has 16 GB and no page file. So far, I haven't had any major issues.

Incidentally, if you have an SSD as your boot drive as I do, then Windows 7 won't even ask to use a USB drive for memory. It's actually faster just reading directly from an SSD than from a USB drive.

The bottleneck on a modern system is not the CPU, though - it's storage throughput and latency.

I have a 4yo MacBook with an old Core 2 Duo, and a OZC Agility SSD, which is far more pleasant to use than most systems with platter drives.

If you're crunching numbers / CAD / playing games, then yes, CPU and RAM performance is a big factor, but for day to day there is no better performance upgrade than a SSD.

^

a much faster running FSB makes a big difference for everything.

anyway, I nearly pulled the trigger on a Samsung SSD many times,,,, soon for me!

I bought one of the original EEE PCs back in 2007 with the 4GB SSD and owners are now fretting over the looming "write limit" of the SSD. :duh2:

I don't think most users will use their SSD long enough for that to be an issue (I've moved on to another netbook) but it is fun to speculate.

Anandtech did a massive write up on SSD's and did the maths on the write limits - and worked out that for the average punter, the drive will outlive the average system replacement age.

But what a way to fail! If a platter drive dies, you will likely lose your data. If a SSD fails, you lose the ability to write, but keep the ability to read. I spend half my working hours recovering data and I love this!

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mvyrmnd, what did they determine as an 'average system replacement age'?

just curious..

SSD drives have leveling software to ensure that writes are spread out over the array so that inability to write is not lost.

That is completely different from a removable USB stick. I could quickly see thrashing it and killing it rather quickly. I million write cycles sounds like a lot, but if you are already paging a lot, it is not.

I would spend the money on more ram.



FYI, on the comment about the SSD drive, that is only partially right. SSD drives do offer some performance advantages mainly in systems that are ram limited. If you have enough ram that you are not paging, then the performance benefit of SSD quickly drops at least once in the application. File loads are still generally faster and of course battery life is better. I have laptops with both, but both have lots of ram too.

Semiman

I posted this thread in the hopes that someone might benefit from it, but obviously most people who posted here know far more about computers than I do, therefore most people already knew about this "flash drive as RAM" option. So it probably didnt benefit anyone.

However, maybe I will learn something new, as I have no idea what an SSD drive is, so someone please fill me in on how it is potentially a better option than more RAM?

Also, while were talking about why computers slow down, I just downloaded a game I discovered on youtube called "World of Tanks". I dont have any other games on this computer, as I'm not what you'd call a 'gamer'. But it looked pretty interesting, so I downloaded it. Problem is, when I go to start it up, its slows my computer way down, to the point that my mouse cursor has a major delay to it. When I try to move the cursor from one side of the screen to the other, there's a major delay that doesnt exist at any other time when I dont have the game turned on. Whats that about? I havent even tried it again since I installed the flash drive as additional RAM because I thought there may be some other issue involved, like maybe the game isnt compatible and may screw up my system(I'm probably giving away how little I know about computers!)

SemiMan said:

SSD drives do offer some performance advantages mainly in systems that are ram limited. If you have enough ram that you are not paging, then the performance benefit of SSD quickly drops at least once in the application.
Semiman

Click to expand...

I disagree 100%. The benefits of an SSD are completely unrelated to RAM. Yes, in a RAM limited system you get less of a performance hit when paging, but that's not why you should go for a SSD.

Highlander...sounds like you're talking about windows readyboost.
I seem to recall that even thigh one might have a 24gb flash drive, windows was limited to using only like 2 or 4 Gb of the stick.
I don't know if things changed once windows 7 came out...but in any case, it all sounds line readyboost!

I am sceptical about the USB thing, as the stick is much slower than RAM or even a normal HD.

I swear on SSD! I have a Thinkpad T60P from 2007, but it as an SSD in it. It performs like mad! Even with dozens of application running at the same time, nothing ever feels laggy or slow. It is a blast to work with it. A SSD is definitely the best thing to speed up even fairly old systems.

Julian Holtz said:

I am sceptical about the USB thing, as the stick is much slower than RAM or even a normal HD.

I swear on SSD! I have a Thinkpad T60P from 2007, but it as an SSD in it. It performs like mad! Even with dozens of application running at the same time, nothing ever feels laggy or slow. It is a blast to work with it. A SSD is definitely the best thing to speed up even fairly old systems.

Click to expand...

Your skepticism is well founded. I'm surfing the net on an ancient el cheapo machine and I tried the whole USB memory expansion thing, the improvement was minimal. SO I just bought an additional memory, installing new memory is the easiest thing you can do on a PC. 5 years later the PC is still running fine and better than new.

This has been around since Windows Vista (or maybe XP) and it's called Ready Boost. I think the single best upgrade an average consumer can make is an SSD, as others have suggested. The seat of your pants speed increase is more noticeable than extra RAM, IMHO.

To answer the question, an SSD is a flash memory based hard drive. No moving parts, no latency. It looks to your computer like a hard drive, complete with faster throughput.

The problem is that you can only write to an SSD a million times or so to each block of SSD memory. You can read a lot more often.

The SSD gets around that limit by writing the data to different spots. Many experts think that a normal laptop will work fine for 4 to 8 years before the SSD wears out.

The plus side of an SSD for laptops are many. It uses less power. I does not crash when you drop it. It can access each file faster and read them faster when they are contiguous.

Anecdote: This laptop was built for Vista, so that tells you how old it is. I runs Linux. I go from off to login prompt in less than 10 seconds. Part of that delay is waiting for the bios. When it goes to hibernate mode, it wakes up (refilling memory from the SSD) in a second.

Daniel