ReadyBoost Testing

[BearPup]

Good Day People,
I have used ReadyBoost on my Win 7 x64 Home Premium systems for years; I use it on my 8 GB desktop and 2 GB laptop PCs. But I've never had a way to test the effectiveness of using the ReadyBoost technology, and I'm wondering what exists to test this technology.

Basically, I keep 2, 16 GB flash drives plugged into my quad core AMD rig with 8 GB of RAM, and a 4 GB flash drive plugged into my 2GB RAM Core Duo Intel laptop.

In effect, am I wasting my money on flash drives that I could put to better use (like transferring files)? Are these machines "faster" or in some other empirical way "better" than machines without these ReadyBoost devices?

Any suggestions for testing, or an article on the effectiveness of ReadyBoost, would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
BearPup

[Joe A.TT]

The truth is although I had toyed around with the idea of trying ReadyBoost on my PC, I never got around to it, and doubt I ever will. However, a quick search on this site turned up this article:

http://www.techsupportalert.com/make...run-faster.htm

The article is a bit old, but you may want to read the section headed Tuning for Performance.

Also, there's this site which tried to maintain a compatibility list for ReadyBoost, but it seems like interest has petered out. I can only hazard a guess that PCs are coming with more RAM installed than in the days this feature was first introduced, and it is possibly negating the need to use ReadyBoost. Also, perhaps people have taken more readily to installing RAM chips, than was the case in the past.

[BearPup]

Thanks for the info, very informative, especially the free program Starter, which I've downloaded and will test out on my desktop computer.

FYI, I started using ReadyBoost when I only had 4 GB of RAM in my desktop, and pretty much kept it out of habit when I doubled my RAM to 8 GB, all based on the old adage that you can't have too much RAM, real or configured.

And felt it was mandatory on a machine with only 2GB RAM, that is not easily upgraded (I'd have to remove the 2, 1 GB RAM chips & get rid of those, then buy 2, 2 GB chips and install them 2+2, a total waste of money and the hours it would take to reach the primary memory chip in my old Dell Latitude laptop).

The second article led to an article that finally tells me how to monitor ReadyBoost performance. Thank you very much, its what I've been looking for.

[Joe A.TT]

Glad I could be of some help. I suspected (and kinda recalled too) that there was a trail to follow somewhere in there.

[kendall.a]

I'm sure that Starter is a good program. I honestly don't know much about it.

However, let me also highly recommend WinPatrol. WinPatrol does, I believe, what Starter does; but only a lot more!

The WinPatrol free version is more than adequate. However, I liked it so much that it is one of the free programs that I actually purchased mainly to support the creator of the program.

[BearPup]

Thank you for responding. I am aware of WinPatrol, but have been put off by everything else it does. I was looking for a dedicated Startup Manager program, similar to the freeware one Startup Guard.

[Anupam]

If you use CCleaner, it has startup manager in the Tools section, and works pretty well.

If you are looking for standalone programs, then you can take a look at these:

WhatInStartup : http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/what_run_in_startup.html
It's a great little program from Nirsoft.

StartUpLite: http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/startuplite/
from Malwarebytes.

Startup Explorer: http://www.pctools.com/startup-explorer/
from PC Tools.

[BearPup]

@Anupam: Thank you, I will check out the programs you suggested. I appreciate.

[rhiannon]

Originally Posted by BearPup

Thanks for the info, very informative, especially the free program Starter, which I've downloaded and will test out on my desktop computer.

I've been using Codestuff Starter for years. It's easy to use and is useful when working on my own or another computer.

[BearPup]

Starter seems to work fine on Win 7 x64 which is nice for a 'dated' program. The only thing it lacks as far as I can see is a startup monitor for real time usage. I still need a separate app for that.