MDO Ltd. announces the release of eBoostr, a complete replacement for Microsoft ReadyBoost technology for Windows XP. Upgrade the performance of your PC without upgrading its components. Get ReadyBoost-like technology in Windows XP. Overcome ReadyBoost limitations and use up to four inexpensive flash devices to speed up your system. Add more speed to your PC without upgrading! If you could improve the performance of your computer by upgrading just one item, that would be memory. Adding more RAM speeds up Windows and applications, allowing the system to access the hard disk less often. This is especially true for older PCs with 256 or 512 MB of RAM, and laptop computers with slow hard drives.
Upgrading computer components can be costly, and is not always possible. Buying and plugging a USB flash memory stick, on the other hand, is neither expensive nor complicated. That is why Microsoft developed a new technology called ReadyBoost. ReadyBoost uses flash memory plugged into a computer to enhance operating system responsiveness, decrease loading time, and improve computer performance. Unfortunately, Microsoft ReadyBoost is only available in Windows Vista. Since the day Microsoft announced its ReadyBoost technology for Windows Vista, the company made it clear that no ReadyBoost upgrade will be released to support Windows XP and older operating systems.
View: Full Story @ eBooster.com
Upgrading computer components can be costly, and is not always possible. Buying and plugging a USB flash memory stick, on the other hand, is neither expensive nor complicated. That is why Microsoft developed a new technology called ReadyBoost. ReadyBoost uses flash memory plugged into a computer to enhance operating system responsiveness, decrease loading time, and improve computer performance. Unfortunately, Microsoft ReadyBoost is only available in Windows Vista. Since the day Microsoft announced its ReadyBoost technology for Windows Vista, the company made it clear that no ReadyBoost upgrade will be released to support Windows XP and older operating systems.
View: Full Story @ eBooster.com
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In Vista, ReadyBoost isn't of much use for PCs having greater than 512 MB because Vista uses a good deal of your RAM for caching data. Also, the more RAM you add, the better it is, since more data can be cached in advance.
Since Speed(RAM) >> Speed(Flash), you won't find any performance increase on Vista PCs having ample amount of memory.
In XP, the memory management isn't as efficient as Vista. Therefore, there exists a point in your PC, beyond which, adding more RAM doesn't automatically mean better performance. Thus all that excess RAM you have in your XP machine usually goes to waste, untill it is needed by some memory hogging app.
Therefore, XP benefits more from ReadyBoost technology than Vista does, and it would deliver no matter how much RAM is installed in the PC.
--
On a side note, I've been beta testing eBooster for a few months now, and found that it does really work - regardless of the amount of RAM you have on your PC.
(Although, if you have 1 GB of RAM or more on your XP machine, it's better to just create a RamDisk and install your frequently used apps into it
o really? i disable that and notice no difference, i would like to see an information about that.
Besides, you ought to be using Hibernate anyways; Shut Down has no purpose any more.
LOL - OK THANKS AL
*gay*
Windows Vista uses the same boot-time prefetching as Windows XP did if the system has less than 512MB of memory, but if the system has 700MB or more of RAM, it uses an in-RAM cache to optimize the boot process. The size of the cache depends on the total RAM available, but is large enough to create a reasonable cache and yet allow the system the memory it needs to boot smoothly.
After every boot, the ReadyBoost service (the same service that implements the ReadyBoost feature just described) uses idle CPU time to calculate a boot-time caching plan for the next boot. It analyzes file trace information from the five previous boots and identifies which files were accessed and where they are located on disk. It stores the processed traces in %SystemRoot%PrefetchReadyboot as .fx files and saves the caching plan under HKLMSystemCurrentControlSetServicesEcacheParameters in REG_BINARY values named for internal disk volumes they refer to.
The cache is implemented by the same device driver that implements ReadyBoost caching (Ecache.sys), but the cache's population is guided by the ReadyBoost service as the system boots. While the boot cache is compressed like the ReadyBoost cache, another difference between ReadyBoost and ReadyBoot cache management is that while in ReadyBoot mode, other than the ReadyBoost service's updates, the cache doesn't change to reflect data that's read or written during the boot.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetma...03/VistaKernel/
Last edited by ManMountain on 14 Nov 2007 - 16:59
This ready boost (to a different extent) reminds me of the same thing.
VERY little performance boost, if any. As with those memory compression programs, REAL ram is
a better option.
This ready boost (to a different extent) reminds me of the same thing.
VERY little performance boost, if any. As with those memory compression programs, REAL ram is
a better option.
Oh yeah, I remember using those RAM optimization programs.... Once used, your system felt even choppier than before... (To me, anyway)
and yeah, i eboostr compared to readyboost is almost like RAID vs a single hard drive?? lots of slow usb keys instead of a single fast one...
a better option.
Currently thats true. Let's remember that a USB stick still has to run at 480mbps (USB 2.0). RAM is a lot faster.
Was that part of the QEMM suite? Ahh, heady days of tweaking to have all DOS devices, keyboard drivers, etc. loaded high leaving yourself 635KB out of 640KB base RAM to play with...
However, you'd be surprised at how well this machine runs. At startup, RAM idles at 150MB usage (this is with antivirus) and about 18 or 19 processes. At typical use, I never go above 350MB of RAM usage.
I do play some older games, and I'm sure it stresses out the RAM then, but the games run well. I also occasionally run Windows 2000 and 98 on VMWare, and this laptop handles it well. Basically, I know how to keep my machine working to the best of its ability for XP.
any suggestions? the /PAE switch only helped me get up from 3.25 GB availability in XP to 3.5 GB. but not the full 4 GB. so 512 MB are lost somewhere.
any suggestions? the /PAE switch only helped me get up from 3.25 GB availability in XP to 3.5 GB. but not the full 4 GB. so 512 MB are lost somewhere.
I always wondered if that really worked or not. I guess it sort of works. I'll have to enable this when I upgrade.
Overall I see a few seconds speed-up of boot time, which is a fraction of the normal time (30 sec if you have a fast PC and clean installation, or 45-60 sec for an average home/office user). I'm not going to spend $30 to save 10 secs of my time, considering that I reboot my PC once or twice a week.
I am the developer of eBoostr and I want to make a few comments.
First of all I want to claim that it really works. You can get up to 300% speed increase on applications loading on a laptop or other computer with short memory and slow hard drives.
Second is that speed increase ratio strongly depends on the speed of the USB stick. As far as I know most ReadyBoost reviewers test it with different amount of RAM, but almost nobody test it against the speed of a flash memory.
Even a computer with a lot of RAM will get significant bonus. I have several configurations with 1-2 GB and got application start up time less by 20-50%. It saves just a few minutes at everyday use, but it will save you a day at year timeline.
As for adding more RAM – there are few concerns:
-- DDR1 is expensive now
-- sometimes you are not able to increase memory (no free slots for example)
-- and finally (probably most important) Windows does not use system memory cache at an optimal way. For example, after some antivirus background work it will be filled with unneeded files you are not going to use. eBoostr caches only the most frequently used files and the cache contents is always up to date.
I tried eboostr and it works, my email prog loads thousands of small files which aren't cached in RAM after a boot or after using a lot of memory, takes 38 seconds to open. Reduced to 23 seconds using eboostr and a fairly dodgy USB flash disk. Also general PC responsiveness can be greatly improved when the hard drive is busy being thrahsed by something.
Next job is to get a fast CF card or 2 (20MB/s cheap these days) and hook it up to a spare IDE port. I tried yesterday with an adapter someone loaned me a while ago, but I couldn't get it to recognise as an IDE disk.
My only worry is that this is a core OS function and it is critically important that it not break the data, so I hope the developer has that covered (imagine if the cache feeds you an old version of a file, or the wrong file). But I haven't seen any problems at all. They're not far off getting my money.
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