L2 Cache

Heya Guys,

I'm running a Win7, Mac dual boot. 1.5GB ram, in a AO150 ZG5 with a 4GB SDHC class 6 SD card for ready boost and I aam immensly happy with it.
Tonight I stumbled upon this link talking about enabling the L2 Cache (Albeit for Win XP Only...?)
http://aspireone.110mb.com/index.php?p=1_16_L2Cache

Well, I took the plunge and did it on Win 7 and upon reboot I noticed an immediate difference on performance, even my boot time increased hugely.

So I just wanted to thank the owner of that site, Gvido Rose, and pass on to you guys another way to edge a fraction more speed

Let me know your experiences

 

Your welcome mate! I changed the "Windows XP only" thing and added two more software hacks that really are Windows XP only :lol:

 

When changing the value for L2 Cache, shouldn't you choose "Decimal" rather than the default "Hexadecimal"? 512 hex is a lot more than 512 decimal. What happens when you tell Windows to use L2 cache that isn't there?

 

The research I have done regarding this "tweak" has indicated that you are correct. The value must be changed to "decimal", or the size gets translated into some large (false) number. It is also possible ( as in my case) that you may have to create the registry string for this feature. For some reason, it isn't a default XP registry entry, dependent on the version of XP you have. Creating the entry has the same results as if it were already there.

 

Actually, I think, changing this value doesn't achieve anything. It's only relevant for older OS and older CPUs:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/183063/en-us
On newer OS and CPU Windows uses HAL and finds out by itself how big the L2 cache is. A default value of 0 indicates that Windows is using what it is told by HAL, *not* that it is using 256kb. Only, if this value doesn't exist at all it may help to add it with a respective value.
So, editing this value is useless.