I've been neglecting my treasured old XP Pro machine lately, with all the fuss over Windows 7 Beta on the newer PC. I've just started using 'ReadyBoost' on the Windows 7 machine, and got wondering if there's anything like that for us dedicated XP users. The good news is that there is, and it's called 'eBoostr' and it will work with a flash memory card, or even (as I'm just discovering) an SDHC card plugged into any handy USB 2.0 port. A 4-Gb SDHC card gives you plenty of space to use for the page files that are moved onto this extra drive. And it saves me a trip to the store for another stick just now. I can use my spare 4-Gb card from the camera. (I knew this would come in handy!)Additional Note:-
I've also found another small freeware program, no longer being developed or supported, but still available, called ARSoft Ramdisk. It's made for NT-based systems like XP, and almost everything in it is pre-configured. The only adjustable part of it is a sliding scale to adjust how many Mb you want it to use. I have 1 Gb of RAM on this, and I read a comment from another user with similar RAM who said that he configured his to have 75 Mb for Ramdisk, and that's enough for ordinary use - so I set mine the same as his, to try it out. It works by creating a virtual disk for the paging file's fast memory usage, as I understand it, and it seems to work OK. The advantage of this over the previous (above) method is that no removable flash memory is involved. It does it all with the hardware you already have, by re-alocating a portion of unused hard-drive for the virtual Ramdrive.
However, since the normal paging file is also using a part of the hard-drive for its files, I'm wondering just how much of an advantage this Ramdrive can really provide. I'll have a better idea after I try it for a while. So far, I haven't noticed much difference.
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