Extreme Performance USB Drives - Technical question

Hello,

I currently use Vista 32b with only 4Gb Ram and I'm using an ordinary 4Gb USB 2.0 Flash drive as additional RAM (Ready Boost I think it's called).

I recently saw an ad about the High speed USB 2.0 Flash drives .

First question is, would it be a significant improve to the computer performance?

If yes,

Would buying a USB drive with higher storage capacity (8+ Gb as high as 32Gb I believe ) also increase performance?

When I ask if it increases I mean, a noticeable increase :).

Thanking you all in advance from an almost hardware illiterate being :).

Perhaps in your case yes. However you should know that USB I/O puts much more load on the CPU than I/O to IDE or SATA drives. So if you think that you might be bound by CPU capacity, it might not be a good idea.

If price isn't an issue just get four more gigs of physical ram and upgrade to a 64 bit OS.

If you're using DDR2, RAM isn't very expensive.

Thank you for your feedback :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 'Sajuuk',index.php?page=Thread&postID=179318#post1 79318

If price isn't an issue just get four more gigs of physical ram and upgrade to a 64 bit OS.

If you're using DDR2, RAM isn't very expensive.

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Price isn't the issue in fact. The issue is more on my hardware illiteracy ^^.
I bought a Dell and they don't provide the 64b Vista. To be honest I don't even know if buying it separately you have to make a clean install or just install on top of it.
That's why I thought about this USB 2.0 drive thingie :).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 'magwo',index.php?page=Thread&postID=179317#post17 9317

Perhaps in your case yes. However you should know that USB I/O puts much more load on the CPU than I/O to IDE or SATA drives. So if you think that you might be bound by CPU capacity, it might not be a good idea.

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I have a Quad 6600/2.4Ghz does it make a difference when you talk about the CPU load?

skip the High speed USB 2.0 Flash drives bite the bullet and buy some more memory.
yeh need 6 gigs of memory, anything over that is gravy.

ready boost needs to be put out back shot and buried
As far as I can tell the idea behind ready boost was so yeh could make marginal systems somewhat functional with vista by using ready boost.

Do you have any friends that upgrade their computers?
It couldn't hurt to ask them for help identifying and installing your RAM.
(Or us, but we can't reach into your computer and install RAM)

I would not use ReadyBoost if I were you.
it's like putting an encrypted pagefile onto a flash drive.
if it's a particularly slow flash drive you can actually slow things down, so you need a pretty slow disk drive for it to be of much benifit.

I used one for a while and I never noticed any speed improvement for having the flash drive or not having the drive.
Then the flash drive died and it locked up my system. ( the flash drive actually got hot ).
I only figured it out because the system started running again when I removed the flash drive.

it was kind of pain to disable readyboost once enabled too.

You can upgrade from 32bit OS to 64bit free of charge. The only drawback is that you cannot perform a harmless upgrade keeping all your settings, you have to perform a clean install.

Does anyone think it would be worthwhile using readyboost with a laptop that has limited ram upgrade possibilites?