Using SD as RAM

Sorry everybody I know this has been covered before but after quite a bit of reading I can't find the answers.

I have an Acer One Windows XP with 120 meg HD and 1 Meg ram.

I have a 16 Meg SD card and would like Windows to use it as ram. First of is this a good idea? Second, if it is, is there available software to cause this to happen? Or are there other ways to use this 16 meg SD card? I would guess this is all contingent on putting the SD card on the left side.

Thanks!

 

first, please say gig instead of meg

second, try eboostr. google for eboostr

 

It has been quite awhile since I used XP but if I remember correctly you could assign a given partition/drive as your virtual memory via the window that opens when you right click on the desktop My Computer icon and select properties that will show the computer systems (not sure about the name) window. one of the tabs will lead to this area.

 

You can, but you must convert the SD card slot as a fixed drive 1st by installing a filter driver.... again, this has been tackled here and the OP can do a search for this around this forum. Cheers.

 

Gig!
Sorry I am old.

My first PC had 4k of Ram.

I did the ebosstr and it works great. Much faster and, I think, better battery life. I used 2 gig of cache from a 16 gig SD card.
Think it would be faster with 4 gig or would that be counterproductive?

 

Please give us some details of your results. I happen to have a 16GB SDHC Class 6 card that I was hoping to use in just this way, to boost speed of all operations, so I am very interested in your results and how "eboostr" works. Will Google it myself in the meantime.

 

Adding a note to this: I installed my 16GB SDHC card, downloaded the trial of eboostr.com, installed and set up a 2 GB cache. Everything works but I have no idea how much faster the AAOne might be than it would be w/o the boost.

It also said, during installation, that using real RAM was way faster than using a USB flash drive or an SD card. I haven't tried that.

My AA1 seems pretty quick in any case, but it would be interesting to see some tests since it has the extra slot that makes this speedup, if it really works, a no brainer.

fbx

 

i think its a good thing to do if you dont have any hard disk space. But since SDHC is slower then a hard drive in general, I think I would rather use some of that 120GB..

 

I'll be interested in your experience. A little googling seems to confirm my experience that there's little to be expected in XP, even from real RAM, above 512meg: for ordinary browsing and office applications. This software might a) save HDD access and wear, and b) improve performance for high intensity applications.

 

The utiity speed test shows HDD access speed of 8.2 MB/s and a cache enabled access speed of 18.82 MB/s or a ratio of 2.3 to 1.

I can tell you it sure seems faster and the HDD certainly flashes less.

 

I tried eboostr myself with a 4GB SDHC card. I've got a 160GB drive in my AAO. ebooster reports 10MB/sec read and write with this card. I could not really tell any difference with ebooster on or off. At first I thought that applications might be loading faster, but then I did some actual timings with ebooster cache on and off and could not see any real differnce; somtimes it was slower with ebooster on, sometimes a little faster, but nothing significant. I like the idea of eboostr, wish that it did work better. Maybe it would help with something super disk intensive like running Dreamweaver, but I'll probably not run that on this machine.

Does anyone know what the "power saving mode" in ebooster does? I'm guessing that it caches more to avoid using the hard drive?

 

I was having trouble moving around on the Net and downloading last night and took eboostr off entirely and my AAO suddenly seemed to work much better, at least in the moving about part. I got the distinct feeling that eboostr wasn't helping adn might even have been hindering operations. probably will reinstall and run some tests.

would like to hear of any other alternatives.

 

I reinstalled eboostr last night with a 1 GB cache and ran it for 30 minutes, then asked for a report of speeds. Got this. Do you think this can be accurate?

 

I don't mean to sound like a smart @$$ or anything, and maybe this isn't possible on all AAO's; but why don't you guys just add another GB of ram? I just bought a stick of 1GB Crucial for $9.99 and should be MUCH faster than anything else one could do. I currently have only 512mb and this will triple my ram up to 1.5GB.

BTW...I got rid of Linux by installing Ron's TinyXp. It only tkaes @ 1gb of memory total and includes MS Office and several tweaks to make things faster. I must say' even with 512MB this little thing is pretty snappy! lol Maybe this alone will make you guys happy with your XP speeds...

http://aspireonesoftware.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/rons-image/#comment-377