ReadySlump?
May 18, 2007
Windows Vista's Windows ReadyBoost sounds too good to be true, and based on our extensive lab tests, it is. The technology promises to let you speed up Windows by plugging an inexpensive USB flash drive into your PC. But we found that while ReadyBoost may speed up Vista a tiny bit, it can also slow it down in some instances.
Oops.
If you want to speed up your computer and load times:
1. get more memory
2. defragment your hard drive. I've noticed windows boots much faster after you back up the computer with Ghost and then restore from the backup.
3. buy a brand-new faster drive. Some of those drives are speed demons.
4. Either turn off real-time anti-virus scanning or at least find one of the fastest programs. I noticed in tests that most anti-virus programs don't actually do a good job at detecting viruses until a full scan. And those that do a better job in real time do slow the computer down more.
The story reminds me that long ago there was a program that was supposed to speed up Windows 3.1 by compressing the cache file.
Then one magazine got a hacker to trace and disassemble the code and found that the program had obviously been released in such an early stage that the compression code had a jump around it -ie it didn't actually run (because, no doubt, it didn't actually work) and thus the only thing the program actually accomplished was to cause crashes (it hooked into the system incorrectly).
Then there were the expensive programs to increase your cache size which, in Windows 3.1 was hard-coded to be twice your ram size. I myself installed IBM's OS2 just so that I could run Mathematica with a larger cache.
It turned out that changing a single text entry in a file called "win.ini" could accomplish that for free and without the bugs.
Posted by: Josh Scholar | May 18, 2007 at 03:01 AM
Add this to the list:
5. Reduce the number of processes that load at startup. That stuff can hog a lot of RAM.
Posted by: Isaac Schrödinger | May 18, 2007 at 03:47 AM
Linux starts up so much faster than Windows.
Posted by: Josh Scholar | May 18, 2007 at 06:52 AM
processes that load at startup
Here's a place to find those.
In the registry under:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/HKEY_CURRENT_USER
SOFTWARE
Microsoft
Windows
CurrentVersion
Run/Run Once/Run OnceEx
Posted by: Josh Scholar | May 18, 2007 at 07:25 AM
FUD. There have been plenty of other tests that have shown a substantial boost with RB.
FUD FUD FUD.
Posted by: FUD | May 18, 2007 at 07:44 AM
Time for some facts:
http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2917&p=6
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/12/07/183118.php
It works amazingly well on computers with lower RAM (including mine).
Posted by: FUD | May 18, 2007 at 07:49 AM