Improve Windows Performance -Tips and Tricks
Our pain is your gain. The folks that make up TRCBNews live on the leading edge. That typically means being on the bleeding edge. We have burned up USB drives, and have some that are now over 10 years old. Our sister (TRCBVideos) has beat the crap out of SATA SSD drives editing video. In other word, if you can use and sometime abuse flash ram, we’ve done everything but ‘Can You Microwave This?’ That is an actual YouTube.com channel.
A few tips and tricks for everyone from the casual Vista users to the Enterprise Data center follow.
End Users
Assuming your using Windows (Vista SP2 or newer), you are in luck. Luck will show up in varying degrees of magic, depending on your particular setup. Generally speaking, a new version of Windows will bring more magic than an older version. Laptops will see more performance improvements than a desktop. The trick is ReadyBoost. This uses an USB key (thumb drive) as an aid. Flash memory USB keys are pretty cheap now, with a street price of about $1. per GB. A few suggestions.
Get a new USB drive about 8GB should do it. Plug it in, with the knowledge you will never remove it. The Flash (pen, thumb, USB drive) will be formatted FAT32. Re-format it to ex-Fat (NTFS for Vista). The reason is FAT32 will be limited to 4GB. The other two choices will take the 8GB. Ex-FAT has less overhead then NTFS.
Once formatted, you may have to right click on the drive and go to Properties. Select the tab on the top that says “ReadyBoost”. Choose the dial that says its going to do nothing but ReadyBoost. Laptop computers have slower hard drives so you will see more performance improvement than a desktop. Both will dance with new life.
ReadyBoost is pretty smart, and it gets smarter with each version of Windows. It will use the flash RAM when it makes a performance improvement, and won’t when it won’t help.
Yes, flash drives have a limited life span when used this way. Still it is measured in years for a life cycle. Less than $10 for a dramatic improvement is a great trade off. Next up is solid-state hard drives (SSD)s.
The topic of SSD’s has a huge underbelly that cannot be covered in one article. For this entry we’re staying with end users.
It is a mistake to think about price per Gigabyte. It isn’t about the quality of the flash RAM or if it is faster (more expensive) single-cell or slower, cheaper multi-cell. It is all about the logic (or lack of) built into the SSD, (as we found out through trial and many errors).
The current winner is Samsung. The Windows Experience index is at the top end of the scale with a 7.9 rating on the new Samsung drives, beating everyone. It appears this is because the Samsung SSDs have an ARM 9 CPU inside to manage the flash RAM. The first generation Samsung drives we’re sub-optimal, so run to eBay for a ‘great deal’.
Laptop users, watch the thickness of the SSD drive. That is another reason the current Samsung is our favorite. It’s skinny enough for pretty much every laptop.
Regardless of the SSD drive you install, Do NOT run defragmentation. Repeat, turn OFF defragment your hard drive. In a nutshell, an SSD drive is not mechanical. No need to defragment. Running this will only cause a ton of data movement, turning on and off the zeros and ones. That will not only wear down your new SSD quickly. It may burn it out completely, due to heat.
We will cover more on SSD and flash for servers and other not client/end user applications shortly. In the meantime go play with ReadyBoost on a machine or two and be ready for a big and happy surprise.
Short URL: http://www.trcbnews.com/?p=7727
Posted by Alden Whitley on Feb 7 2012. Filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry