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Speed up your computer part 4/4: ReadyBoost and extra RAM
Hi, this is the last part of how to speed up your computer with little or no cash. Our other parts are

• Part 1 (defragment your hard drive)
• Part 2 (The Page File)
• Part 3 (The HDD file system and MSCONFIG)

ReadyBoost
Remember what we talked about in Part 2 (The Page File)? If not then i recommend that you do so if you are just on this post for the readyboost feature. OK so are you running vista but you don’t have much memory inside your computer and you don’t want to open the case? Then look here because the new readyboost feature that is now included with windows vista helps you make your applications run faster.

How?
Readyboost uses a USB Flash memory stick and use that for the page file. how does this help? well using the page file on your USB Flash Drive means it will be much faster than any hard drive.  This means that applications will run much faster because files and be can stored and used much faster.

Great! so how do i do it?
Well for starters you need a USB Flash Drive that has at-least 230MB free, you need to have a usb 2.0 compliant usb drive (don’t worry all flash drives are today even if you bought it a year ago) and some flash drives may not have the performance needed to make an impact.

To enable readyboost for your computer you need to:

• Plug your flash drive into any usb 2.0 port
• Go to my computer
• Find your Flash drive in the removable drives section
• right-click your flash drive and select properties

Now the properties window should show on your desktop you can:

• Go to the readyboost tab
• if you haven’t let the computer scan your flash disk then click the scan button

This is where some of you may encounter a point where you cant use readyboost because your flash disks don’t have the performance needed to enable readyboost. You may get a screen that looks like this(below):

If your flash drive has enough performance to qualify for readyboost then you can:

• First set how much megabytes you want readyboost to use (the more space it uses the better performance gain, there is also a recommendation at the bottom for optimal performance)
• Once finished, start the readyboost function by clicking the “Use this device” Radio button.

How to make your USB Flash drive compatible with readyboost
If windows has told you that your flash drive is incompatible this may be the fact that some little changes are in order to optimise the performance of your drive. Here are some tips to get the most out of your flash drive.

• Formatting the drive
• changing general properties
• changing hardware properties

Formatting the drive

• Go to my computer
• right-click your flash drive and click Format
• Make sure the file system is set to NTFS(don’t know what that is? look at Part 3 (The HDD file system and MSCONFIG))
• Set the allocation unit size to 4096
• click format the drive (NOTE: this will delete all files and folders on your disk so backup your information first!)

Changing General Settings

• Go to my computer and right-click your flash drive
• select properties
• in the general tab make sure that these two check-boxes are checked(below)
• Compress this drive to save disk space
• Index this drive for faster searching
• click apply

Changing Hardware Settings

• Go to my computer
• Right-click your flash drive and select properties
• In properties select the hardware tab
• In the hardware tab find your device in the list box
• Select your device and click the properties button
• In your device properties, in the general tab select change settings
• Now go to the policy’s tab and select optimize for performance radio button.

Forcing windows to enable readyboost
Now if the process above does not work for you (your drive may be missing the requirements by a very small amount) then you can force windows to enable readyboost for that device. I do not recommend doing this with a really old device as you may experience negative performance. Also this process requires tampering with the registry settings so if your not confident enough to do this then i suggest you just leave it.

ok here’s how to do it:

• Make sure your device is plugged in
• go to my computer
• right-click your device and select properties
• select the readyboost tab
• Check the “Do not retest this device” check-box
• unplug your flash drive
• click start and open “Run” (type run in start search)
• In the run dialog box type regedit and click OK
• Expand HKLM (Local Machine) > SOFTWARE > Microsoft NT > CurrentVersion > EMDgmt
• Find your device
• Change Device Status to 2
• Change ReadSpeedKB’s to 1000
• Change WriteSpeedKB’s to 1000
• Plug in your device
• go back to the readyboost tab
• Enable readyboost

I would recommend that people only with a lack of RAM use this process to force the device to be used because people with lots of ram but want to stop more files being used on the hard disk will not see a performance gain but a decrease.

Buying more memory
OK so one thing that’s much better than all the tricks that i have shown over the past 4 parts of my guide is buying more memory. Windows XP was quite memory hungry and vista is no different either (in-fact it needs twice the minimum amount of ram that XP needs). So if your system is slow and unresponsive the most cheapest and easiest Way to make your system faster is add more RAM.

What type of RAM do i need?
There is lots of different types of RAM and depending on how old you system is you may have to buy different RAM than what is front-lined on the market. There are tools that you can use to see what type of RAM that your system needs. You can use the crucial system scanner which will scan your system to see which type of ram your system uses and then recommend some RAM for you. You can find this here http://www.crucial.com/systemscanner/.

You can also use sisoftwares Sandra lite which is a diagnostic tool, this will give you loads of information on your computers specification. This may be too much information for beginners to computing. If your going to use sisoftwares Sandra lite then here’s the information that you need to look out for:

• The memory Speed(this will usually be a 4 digit number like 5300 or 3200)
• What technology it uses (most newer computers bought within the last two years will most likely use DDR or DDR2 RAM)
• Whether the RAM is Unbuffered

This information should be enough for you to look on the Internet or go to your local computer store and get the ram that you need. you can find sisoftwares Sandra lite here http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/.

OK so this is the end of the speed up your computer guide I will be posting soon a tutorial on how to install RAM in your machine soon, thank you for reading this post!

Get rid of FAT
If you have upgraded your computer from windows 95 or 2000(windows 98 cant be upgraded to xp you have to upgrade to windows 2000 first) then your hard disk may still be using the old FAT32 file system. The FAT32 file system is slow and needs to be De-fragmented much more frequently than the newer NTFS file system.

Checking you file system

• Go to my computer
• find your hard disk and right click
• select properties
• on the general tab your file system will be listed near the top of the window

Changing your file system to NTFS
If your file system is NTFS then you can easily change this by going into the command prompt. here’s how.

• Click Start and open “Run”
• in “Run” type cmd and click OK
• In the Command Prompt type convert [your drive letter]: /fs:ntfs
• Press enter, your computer will say “windows needs to restart to make the changes”
• restart your system
• once restarted the computer will convert the file format and then reboot twice
  

Using MSCONFIG to change the start-up programs
MSCONFIG also known as the System Configuration Utility can be used to change the start-up programs and services that windows will load. This will speed up your computer by freeing up more system resources. To open MSCONFIG

• Click Start and open “Run”
• type msconfig and click OK

You should now be in a window that looks like this(below):

 Now to change the start-up programs and services:

• Go to the start-up tab
• In the list box you can see all the programs and services
• Uncheck the boxes to stop a program or service
• The name of the service or program is on the left
• Don’t stop a program or service unless you are sure you know what it is and does. if you dont know then keep it on.
• Click OK once finished

Now you will be asked to restart your computer to put the changes into effect.

• Restart your computer
• Once the desktop has loaded a message box should appear saying “you have edited the start-up programs with MSCONFIG”
• If you don’t want this message to appear every time you start-up then click the check-box “don’t show this again”
• Click OK

OK this concludes Speed up your computer part 3 and in the next part i will probably be talking about Ready-Boost for those vista users and adding more memory to you computer.

thank you reading this post!

Use little or no money
Giving your computer a little turbo boost if its lost its spark over the years is easy with some basic maintenance and a little money. Those that spend are going to get the best performance but for those that don’t want to spend anything extra will still see a good performance gain provided you don’t already do what I’ve shown(and about to show).

Increasing the page file
Changing the way the page file operates and increasing its size will help your performance. It will save CPU(central processing unit, the brain of the computer) recources and your computer will have more room for windows to store system files which are important to running programs.

The page file explained
The page file is a section on your hard disk that has been reserved to act as though it where RAM(Random Access Memory), RAM is your computers memory that handles data that is sent to and from the CPU.

 Take this example, you type a letter on Microsoft word and this data gets sent through the keyboard to your computer. The CPU will need to process this data and send instructions to the monitor to display this new letter, the only problem is the keyboards language is different from the CPU’s and the monitors language is different as-well, how to they understand each other? well that’s where the RAM comes in, it takes the data between and sorts it into a set of instructions that the CPU and other input(keyboard) and output(monitor) devices can understand. So essentially the more memory you have the more operations your computer can do at once.

The problem with the page file
So the page file acts as RAM, Great i don’t have to upgrade my computer! unfortunatly this isnt the case the page file is on the hard drive and compared to the speed of the memory the page file is like a 91 year old with stilts, it just isn’t near as fast as the ram and depending on the page file to give you permanent performance increase wont happen. Increasing the page file if you are experiencing slowness on your computer is really only a temporary action before buying extra memory.

So how do i do it?
Right so now we know more about the page file we can begin to increase the page file. I have made a short video on how to do this below. I am showing you how to do this on windows vista but their is basically no difference between doing this on vista and on xp.  

Ok so i have included a youtube version of my video. This may be too small so i have included a download from my website www.wizardcreations.co.uk below. just right-click the link below and select “save as” to download.

www.wizardcreations.co.uk/PageFileFinal.wmv

Thank you for looking at my post.