Lord Chaos

I have a pretty fast modern machine

QX9650
i780 Mobo
8 Gb 4-3-3-10 800 Mhz RAM
4 WD Raptors in Raid 0 on a promise PCI-E RAID Controller

Is readyboost even going to make any difference for this system at all? I have a 4 Gb Corsair USB key in the machine, but doesn't seem to make a difference and when I test the key its performance is vastly inferior to the harddrives except on small files where its only slightly faster.

truthseeker

If you have 8GB RAM, then ReadyBoost will not help you. That is my amateur opinion however and I could be wrong, as I usually am more wrong than I am right :-)

But I think ReadyBoost is only benefical with lower RAM than you have. E.g. I run Vista in a 1GB RAM Notebook, and I installed a 1GB ReadyBoost USB Stick, and it is helping my performance. But with an 8GB RAM system, I doubt it, as my system doesn't even run 8GB of memory stuff. Does yours?

peterhuang913

No, you have 8GB.

Lord Chaos

Yeah, very well too. the machine is blazingly smooth in Vista even when bogged down by an ungodly amount of running programs.

But I am always seeking to add just a little extra *umph* to it, heh.

Thanks for the help guys.

Placehold

I have to ask Lord Chaos how Vista recognises 8GB?
Vista itself will not recognise more then 3.5GB of RAM

Does your system actually recognise 8GB?

Regards




Craig

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truthseeker

Well you can only go so far and do only so much :) Having 8GB RAM indicates that you have reached your limit on improving Vista's performance.

Have you tried things like Auslogics Boostspeed and used the Vista Tweak program? I used that and I removed all of Vista's fancy looking stuff like Aero and fancy menu shadows etc.

Even though my Vista now looks like a Windows 95 system, it runs super fast since I tweaked it and chose to go go performance rather than visual.

To me, performance is more important than visual experience.

And one thing I love about Vista is that at times my BF2142 game crashes but Vista lets me close it and Vista still runs as normal.

But in XP, if certain programs like BF2142 crashed and froze, the whole XP used to freeze on me, and nothing I did would unfreeze it, not even ctrl+alt+Del etc.

But in Vista it works like a charm.

Vista is so much more reliable, stable than XP.

Lord Chaos

Vista 32 Bit won't recognise more RAM than that, but Vista 64 Bit (which is what I have) will recognise all of it and run it well :)

Placehold

Just to clarify that SP1 has to be installed before 8GB is fully useable tho

Tested it on my laptop last night

regards




Craig

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Lord Chaos

Huh? I had full access to and could use the 8 Gb of RAM from the beginning, the only thing that was needed later was when I changed mobo it needed a hotfix.

I got SP-1 a while back and it didn't make any difference to my 8 Gb of memory at all, it remained as accessible as it was before.

Placehold

Apparently SP1 contained hotfixes that allowed the complete 8GB's in 64bit to be read completely, i only got my laptop about 2 months ago and that had an 8GB RAM at purchase, a little bit more money of course but it never did show the complete 8GB until i updated SP1

If you aready had SP1 or the single hotfixes then you would have been ok

regards




Craig

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Lord Chaos

That was probably because your motherboard was using one of the newer chipsets that gives issues in Vista and SP-1 does contain that hotfix (or you can download it seperately long before SP-1 came out).

I have had 8 Gb of memory for almost a year now in Vista with no problems at all, at first on an EVGA i680 board which didn't give Vista problems, it was only when I updated to i780 it needed a hotfix and then it ran fine afterwards (though that makes it a little hard to reinstall as vista won't install unless I remove all but 1 memory stick).

truthseeker

Vista may have reported it as being there as 8GB RAM, but it could not use it.

Lord Chaos

I did say I could and did use it. Just to doublecheck I checked up on some 8 Gb RAM on Vista 64 Bit tests and they reported no such problems either even thought they were all pre-SP1

I don't know where you got this misconception from...do you have any links to where you got this information from?

truthseeker

Link for what? I do not need to give a link as I never made a claim.

Notice very carefully my grammar and words that I used.... I said... "Vista may have reported it as being there as 8GB RAM, but it could not use it." Now if you ask any grammar and English professor or teacher to interpret that sentence, they will tell you that because I used the word "may" in that context, that the statement was not a absolute or definite claim, contrary, it was an open idea and rhetorical question aimed at stimulating an open idea, based, not fact.

By the way, I removed and disabled Superfetch and Readyboost from my Vista as the 1GB ReadyBoost USB stick was slowing down my online game. But it did speed up loading my usual programs, e.g. Firefox, Thunderbird etc. So ReadyBoost does work and speeds up the loading time for commonly used applications. But the downside for me was that it slowed down my internet game, so it was not worth keeping it on for me.

And once I removed and disabled Superfetch and Readyboost my HDD has totally stopped winding and grinding away non-stop, and thank goodness for that, it was driving me mad listening to the HDD endlessly grind away. But with Superfetch and Readyboost disabled, now my HDD sits perfectly idle and silent when it's not loading anything. :-)

Lord Chaos

Ok fair enough, I'll go with that explaination. :) Don't really want to argue it.

But thanks everyone for the answers. Readyboost btw likely slows down games because games use big files and Flashdrives are notoriously slow for larger files (low transfer speed, fast access speed), much slower than HDD, while its tremendously faster with small files...so it makes sense it boosts applications as they often use a bunch of smaller files.