[rex27]

I run WinXP pro on an 1.6 GHz Intel Celeron processor, with 256MB RAM.

As you can imagine, the performance of the system is pretty poor.

My machine is pretty old, and uses SDRAM (the type that's being phased out by DDRAM) and I'd just like to make clear I have no intention of getting a new machine.

So I was just wondering if I could use a USB flash drive as additional RAM for the system.

If it is possible, I'd be grateful to anyone who could tell me how to do it.

Thanks in advance!

 

[8210GUY]

TBH I'm not sure you can, maybe someone knows better though, but I don't think so personally, and given the age of the PC given memory size\type you will be limited as to how much you can put in it anyway, if you reply with your system spec's we will try to help you find out what you need but your probably looking at buying more ram, but one would hope it will be really cheap given it's age, hope that helps a bit anyway.

 

[MaverickUK]

As far as i'm aware, that's not currently possible.

 

[PanamaGal]

No. The RAM in your computer is dynamic, meaning it needs to constantly be refreshed, and any byte can be accessed without touching the preceding one. The flash memory in the USB drive is written to or read from in orderly blocks, not individual bytes. The memory in a flash drive is very similar to your BIOS chip, a type of EEPROM.

 

[linderman]

P-Gal ray:

 

[rex27]

Disappointed

Oh well - thanks for the help anyways.

 

[mc_ram]

im sure vista allows flash mem to be run as ram
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/windowsvista/features/foreveryone/performance.mspx

 

[crazijoe]

On top of what P-Gal just said. You would never see a performance increase because your bottleneck would be the USB interface. At maximum of 480Mb/s, transfer speeds are equivalent to or worse than a hard drive. It would be better to just let the data page to your exsiting hard drive.

 

[TheMatt]

SD RAM is still available from many places, so you can probably still upgrade your RAM to at least 512 MB, and maybe 1 GB.

 

[Kalim]

I doubt he'd have USB 2.0 on there in the first place. So the bottleneck is much lower and data access would be very slow. No the whole make-up of dynamic RAM is very different and the memory bus lanes need to be used to transfer the RAM data from and to the CPU, which can't occur with a USB controller.