XP's 'eBoostr' and 'Ramdisk' - removed ....

Now that I've satisfied my curiosity about these two, I've once again reverted to 'square one' and deleted them both from the system.

'eBoostr' in its Demo form installed and ran OK, but if you purchase it, you're looking at $36.00 + tax, and you need to buy a flash memory stick optimized for 'ReadyBoost' (to get the kind with fast memory response time) which adds another cost to it. I didn't notice any real change in the system's performance using it with the available flash card I have, which has a fast-response memory itself.

Next, I tried 'Ramdisk', and it didn't seem to make any difference, or if any, it was slower than without it. So the system is back to as it was before these experiments.

I'm told that (a) using a flash memory stick as a paging file/supplementary RAM will wear it out faster than normal because of all the increased imprinting and erasing of it which is normal for that use. (b) The XP system isn't designed with programs like 'ReadyBoost' or 'eBoostr' in mind, and so it doesn't respond well when one of those is installed. That latter point may or may not be valid, because XP, as well as Vista and Windows 7, are all based on the NT and its NTFS format, so theoretically, whatever works on one should work on all of those operating systems. This isn't strictly the case, however, as we've already seen with Vista. But it does seem to hold true for XP and Windows 7. I can't explain that, except to say that Vista was the exception to more than one rule.