Vista users: ReadyBoost! - Page 4

Paikis · 07-31-2007, 09:02 AM

And which of vista's setting would you suggest turning off? where would i find those?

Also, since i have 2GB of ram, would you suggest 2GB or 4GB swap?

Another quick question as well: I have an 80GB harddrive and a 340GB harddrive. Is it possible to COPY the contents of the 80GB hard-drive (with Vista on it) onto the 340GB one and still have vista work? (I tried it and it didn't work, but i was just copying) Basically I have vista and all my games and etc on the 80GB HDD, i want them on the 340. I DO NOT want to have to download 3 days worth of patches again. Any help?

Morara · 07-31-2007, 09:05 AM

2GB would be enough for most people, but if you have the spare space, go ahead and make it 4GB.

As for turning off settings, under that Visual Effects tab in the second shot, just uncheck everything except for things like font smoothing if you're having performance issues. Also, run services.msc and disable the Windows Search service.

Pinski · 07-31-2007, 09:48 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Morara

Basically, I recommend making a partition just for swap, so regular filesystem fragmentation won't force the swap file to fragment as well.

The max amount of swap per drive is 4GB, but you can put more by spreading it out across multiple drives. As far as size, a general rule of thumb is to use twice your RAM until you break 2GB on a desktop (CAD workstations and servers might require more), then use an amount equal to your RAM.

Regular file system fragmentation won't force the swap file to ever fragment. Why? Because it's created as the full file(if you don't use that dumb ranged swap file sizing), thus it takes up everything right away and will NEVER become fragmented.

As for max amount of swap per drive is 4GB? No it's not. I've had my page file set into 6GB just because I forgot to change it.

As for the "general" rule for page size, it's 1.5x-2x always, no matter how much ram you have. Windows doesn't use the page file as extra memory only, it pretty much does a lot of shit with it, so having a bigger page file is a good thing for performance no matter what.

Morara · 07-31-2007, 09:58 AM

The swap file isn't written like most pre-allocated data, in that it's only allocated for space reservation, and not cluster reservation, and it becomes fragmented pretty easily through heavy use, even when it's the only thing on the drive. Regular swap defragmentation does wonders for performance.

As for the max size per drive, I just checked it myself, and yeah, I was wrong about that. I just could have sworn I hit that hurdle at some point (maybe in the NT4 period) and always spread it across multiple volumes.

Malawk · 07-31-2007, 12:48 PM

These are my specs:

System Specs:

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 Kentsfield 3.0GHz CPU
2 Seagate Cheetah 15k.4 74GB 15,000 RPM Hard Drives
Dual Ultra Leviathan GeForce 8800 Water Cooling Video Cards
Corsair Dominator 4GB (4 x 1GB) Water Cooling DDR2 Memory
Asus Striker Extreme LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ATX Mother Board

Morara · 07-31-2007, 01:04 PM

As soon as Intel chipsets support SLI, I'd ditch that nForce board.

Malawk · 07-31-2007, 05:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Morara

As soon as Intel chipsets support SLI, I'd ditch that nForce board.

Indeed I will

I find at some points the chip set does run hot at times and with my 4 Sticks of Corsair Water Cooling Ram (Apporoved even for all 4 slots) the board will fucking freeze up on startup and the god damn BIOS fucking blow cowass but other than that it's alright I guess.

Petgroup · 07-31-2007, 11:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paikis

And which of vista's setting would you suggest turning off? where would i find those?

Also, since i have 2GB of ram, would you suggest 2GB or 4GB swap?

Another quick question as well: I have an 80GB harddrive and a 340GB harddrive. Is it possible to COPY the contents of the 80GB hard-drive (with Vista on it) onto the 340GB one and still have vista work? (I tried it and it didn't work, but i was just copying) Basically I have vista and all my games and etc on the 80GB HDD, i want them on the 340. I DO NOT want to have to download 3 days worth of patches again. Any help?

Norton Ghost will allow you to clone 1 drive and then copy the clone onto a new drive. This is what I planned on doing if Vista fails my install from only having a 4gb Hard drive.

So in short, install Ghost, clone the C:, then take the clone and have it copied to the new drive and it gives you the option to make it bootable.

Heres the link to the 30 day trial of Ghost

Norton Ghost 12.0 30-Day Trialware - Symantec Home & Home Office Store - Product Information

Jonny · 08-01-2007, 10:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Iryssinia

Not entirely sure how it works to make things faster, but I picked up a 2gig USB thumb drive for $15 and enabled ReadyBoost usage on it, and the game really runs a lot better now. I think it's a pretty worthwhile investment for people who's systems aren't exactly the latest and greatest.

Just a heads up, I read about a group that did some testing on this recently. The results were odd. They tested using some cheaper USB thumbs (10-75 range) which did improve performance. But the most noticable boost came from a $200 thumb that used some expensive memory. Performance increase was triple/quad over the cheaper thumbs.

Wish I wouldve bookmarked the article. I didnt cause Im not using Vista on any systems yet. It was probably no older then 2 weeks.

Iryssinia · 08-02-2007, 08:10 AM

Jonny, thanks for the update.

The reason I posted it though, was because it was a very cheap upgrade. At $200, you're better off going with a RAMdisk, I'd think.

Good info, though.