I thought I would share this with you all, a few little tricks to boost
Windows performance.

If you have a spare USB flash drive or you are willing to get a cheap say
1GB flash drive.

First we plug in the flash drive.

Go to Disk Manager and assign it a drive letter, like Z: (this is just to
get it out of the way and optional)

Go to Advanced system settings, Evironment variables.

Change the Temp variable under User to Z:\ (I didn't see any point creating
folders, but that's optional)

Change the Temp variable under System variable to Z:\

This will cut down on I/O traffic to the hard drive. Starting an app like
Word, would cause the HD to read the program into memory while at the same
time writing into the drive, temporary files. This causes an I/O queue to
form and degrade Windows performance. By off loading some of the I/O
traffic to another storage device, the hard drive read/write head doesn't
have to move around as much either. All performance gains.

Another trick I tried was moving Windows Search Index to a flash drive, but
it won't let me select even a 16GB flash drive. Even though the Index
doesn't grow beyond 1GB. It's max size seems to be just under 1GB. You can
move to it to a removable drive, though. I rebuilt the Index on an external
500GB USB drive. Again, this cuts down I/O traffic to the internal hard
drive. More performance gain.

Another idea I tried was creating a pagefile on a 16GB USB flash drive. I
found out you can only have 4095MB pagefile or just under 25% of total
capacity. I don't know what the rule of thumb is though, because on the
internal 1TB hard drive I could create up to the max free space, which was
about 700,000GB. Not that I needed that much, but just to test. I'm
actually running with 4GB RAM and no page file, at the moment. Even with
lots of 100MB picture (scanned documents/photos) open, virtual memory wasn't
required. I would like to use most of an 8GB flash drive. Possibly use it
for both temp files and virtual memory.

I don't know if pagefile is the same thing as running ReadyBoost. I don't
think it is, but I will have to look into that. I am not using Readyboost,
since I read it doesn't do much good if you have more than 2GB of RAM.

Now, if you have a 2nd or 3rd internal hard drive, you can create a pagefile
on the 2nd drive and search index on the 3rd or index on 2nd and page file
on 3rd. I highly recommended using a USB drive for temp files. 1-2GB are
pretty cheap. I don't think you need a larger one unless you are working
with full length movies, but I don't for certain.

They do something like this on big database servers, some might refer to as
"mainframes". The index and database are each on their own storage device.
The aggregated bandwidth offers even better performance then RAID and the
best part is you can implement it along side with RAID for insane amount of
storage I/O performance.

Anyways, that's it.

If you need more detailed info on setting this up, leave a little note in
the newsgroup. If I don't get to it, I'm sure someone else will help you
out.

"Tae Song" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:E4A312C4-33A9-4FD8-8FF7-(E-Mail Removed)...
> I thought I would share this with you all, a few little tricks to boost
> Windows performance.
>
> If you have a spare USB flash drive or you are willing to get a cheap say
> 1GB flash drive.
>
> First we plug in the flash drive.
>
> Go to Disk Manager and assign it a drive letter, like Z: (this is just to
> get it out of the way and optional)
>
> Go to Advanced system settings, Evironment variables.
>
> Change the Temp variable under User to Z:\ (I didn't see any point
> creating folders, but that's optional)
>
> Change the Temp variable under System variable to Z:\
>
> This will cut down on I/O traffic to the hard drive. Starting an app like
> Word, would cause the HD to read the program into memory while at the same
> time writing into the drive, temporary files. This causes an I/O queue to
> form and degrade Windows performance. By off loading some of the I/O
> traffic to another storage device, the hard drive read/write head doesn't
> have to move around as much either. All performance gains.
>
> Another trick I tried was moving Windows Search Index to a flash drive,
> but it won't let me select even a 16GB flash drive. Even though the Index
> doesn't grow beyond 1GB. It's max size seems to be just under 1GB. You
> can move to it to a removable drive, though. I rebuilt the Index on an
> external 500GB USB drive. Again, this cuts down I/O traffic to the
> internal hard drive. More performance gain.
>
> Another idea I tried was creating a pagefile on a 16GB USB flash drive. I
> found out you can only have 4095MB pagefile or just under 25% of total
> capacity. I don't know what the rule of thumb is though, because on the
> internal 1TB hard drive I could create up to the max free space, which was
> about 700,000GB. Not that I needed that much, but just to test. I'm
> actually running with 4GB RAM and no page file, at the moment. Even with
> lots of 100MB picture (scanned documents/photos) open, virtual memory
> wasn't required. I would like to use most of an 8GB flash drive.
> Possibly use it for both temp files and virtual memory.
>
> I don't know if pagefile is the same thing as running ReadyBoost. I don't
> think it is, but I will have to look into that. I am not using
> Readyboost, since I read it doesn't do much good if you have more than 2GB
> of RAM.
>
> Now, if you have a 2nd or 3rd internal hard drive, you can create a
> pagefile on the 2nd drive and search index on the 3rd or index on 2nd and
> page file on 3rd. I highly recommended using a USB drive for temp files.
> 1-2GB are pretty cheap. I don't think you need a larger one unless you
> are working with full length movies, but I don't for certain.
>
> They do something like this on big database servers, some might refer to
> as "mainframes". The index and database are each on their own storage
> device. The aggregated bandwidth offers even better performance then RAID
> and the best part is you can implement it along side with RAID for insane
> amount of storage I/O performance.
>
> Anyways, that's it.
>
> If you need more detailed info on setting this up, leave a little note in
> the newsgroup. If I don't get to it, I'm sure someone else will help you
> out.

I forgot to mention, putting pagefile on USB flash drive doesn't work. I
think Windows tries to create it during boot, but USB drivers don't get
loaded so it can't access the flash drive to create it. (Probably why you
can't boot in to Windows from USB drives, I even tried enabling BIOS support
for USB drive which works for booting Linux). When I got into Windows and
checked, the pagefile never got created. But if you have another internal
hard drive or maybe even eSATA (in non-ACHI/RAID mode) you can create a
pagefile there.

Done. I think.

Tae Song wrote:
> I thought I would share this with you all, a few little tricks to boost
> Windows performance.
>
> If you have a spare USB flash drive or you are willing to get a cheap say
> 1GB flash drive.
>
> First we plug in the flash drive.
>
> Go to Disk Manager and assign it a drive letter, like Z: (this is just to
> get it out of the way and optional)
>
> Go to Advanced system settings, Evironment variables.
>
> Change the Temp variable under User to Z:\ (I didn't see any point
> creating
> folders, but that's optional)
>
> Change the Temp variable under System variable to Z:\
>
> This will cut down on I/O traffic to the hard drive. Starting an app like
> Word, would cause the HD to read the program into memory while at the same
> time writing into the drive, temporary files. This causes an I/O queue to
> form and degrade Windows performance. By off loading some of the I/O
> traffic to another storage device, the hard drive read/write head doesn't
> have to move around as much either. All performance gains.

I don't think so!! There will be a performance LOSS, in large part due to
the much longer write times to a flash drive. Also, it's generally a poor
idea to have so many continuous writes to a flash drive, as flash drives
have a more limited number of write cycles.

<snip> rest of this post

"Tae Song" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:E4A312C4-33A9-4FD8-8FF7-(E-Mail Removed)...
>I thought I would share this with you all, a few little tricks to boost
>Windows performance.
>
> If you have a spare USB flash drive or you are willing to get a cheap say
> 1GB flash drive.
>
> First we plug in the flash drive.
>
> Go to Disk Manager and assign it a drive letter, like Z: (this is just to
> get it out of the way and optional)
>
> Go to Advanced system settings, Evironment variables.
>
> Change the Temp variable under User to Z:\ (I didn't see any point
> creating folders, but that's optional)
>
> Change the Temp variable under System variable to Z:\
>

So what happens when you remove the flash drive and the TEMP variable points
to a non-existant drive?

"Tae Song" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:E4A312C4-33A9-4FD8-8FF7-(E-Mail Removed)...
>I thought I would share this with you all, a few little tricks to boost
>Windows performance.

Seeing that flash drives are much slower than hard disks, I wonder if your
measures have the desired effect. Could we have some performance figures,
complete with the test methods you applied so that anyone can perform the
same tests on his machine?

"measekite Da Monkey" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:FfUXl.5841$(E-Mail Removed)...
>
>
> So what happens when you remove the flash drive and the TEMP variable
> points to a non-existant drive?

Windows will have very serious problems.

Why not just create and RAMDRIVE and use it for the TMP/TEMP variables?

"Tae Song" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:E4A312C4-33A9-4FD8-8FF7-(E-Mail Removed)...
>I thought I would share this with you all, a few little tricks to boost
>Windows performance.
>
> If you have a spare USB flash drive or you are willing to get a cheap say
> 1GB flash drive.
>
> First we plug in the flash drive.
>
> Go to Disk Manager and assign it a drive letter, like Z: (this is just to
> get it out of the way and optional)
>
> Go to Advanced system settings, Evironment variables.
>
> Change the Temp variable under User to Z:\ (I didn't see any point
> creating folders, but that's optional)
>
> Change the Temp variable under System variable to Z:\
>
> This will cut down on I/O traffic to the hard drive. Starting an app like
> Word, would cause the HD to read the program into memory while at the same
> time writing into the drive, temporary files. This causes an I/O queue to
> form and degrade Windows performance. By off loading some of the I/O
> traffic to another storage device, the hard drive read/write head doesn't
> have to move around as much either. All performance gains.
>
> Another trick I tried was moving Windows Search Index to a flash drive,
> but it won't let me select even a 16GB flash drive. Even though the Index
> doesn't grow beyond 1GB. It's max size seems to be just under 1GB. You
> can move to it to a removable drive, though. I rebuilt the Index on an
> external 500GB USB drive. Again, this cuts down I/O traffic to the
> internal hard drive. More performance gain.
>
> Another idea I tried was creating a pagefile on a 16GB USB flash drive. I
> found out you can only have 4095MB pagefile or just under 25% of total
> capacity. I don't know what the rule of thumb is though, because on the
> internal 1TB hard drive I could create up to the max free space, which was
> about 700,000GB. Not that I needed that much, but just to test. I'm
> actually running with 4GB RAM and no page file, at the moment. Even with
> lots of 100MB picture (scanned documents/photos) open, virtual memory
> wasn't required. I would like to use most of an 8GB flash drive.
> Possibly use it for both temp files and virtual memory.
>
> I don't know if pagefile is the same thing as running ReadyBoost. I don't
> think it is, but I will have to look into that. I am not using
> Readyboost, since I read it doesn't do much good if you have more than 2GB
> of RAM.
>
> Now, if you have a 2nd or 3rd internal hard drive, you can create a
> pagefile on the 2nd drive and search index on the 3rd or index on 2nd and
> page file on 3rd. I highly recommended using a USB drive for temp files.
> 1-2GB are pretty cheap. I don't think you need a larger one unless you
> are working with full length movies, but I don't for certain.
>
> They do something like this on big database servers, some might refer to
> as "mainframes". The index and database are each on their own storage
> device. The aggregated bandwidth offers even better performance then RAID
> and the best part is you can implement it along side with RAID for insane
> amount of storage I/O performance.
>
> Anyways, that's it.
>
> If you need more detailed info on setting this up, leave a little note in
> the newsgroup. If I don't get to it, I'm sure someone else will help you
> out.

"measekite Da Monkey" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:FfUXl.5841$(E-Mail Removed)...


Good question... so I pulled out the flash drive.

I started up Outlook (which today's service pack for Office XP fixed. In
Office XP, Outlook does not work if you don't already have Outlook Express
installed. It hadn't worked till early today after the latest update. I
never installed Outlook Express on this Vista system.) I gave me an error
message it couldn't create Normal.dot or something. I didn't make a note of
it, sorry. It didn't display normally. Address bar/field displays
outlook:today, but in the main window it's says Navigation to the webpage
was canceled. Under that, it says What you can try: bullet Retype the
address.

I Open up Word everything seems to be working OK. Few minutes later message
says, "Saving the AutoRecovery file is postponed for Normal.dot."

I opened Access, Power Point, Excel, GIMP (which took much longer than
normal to open). Some minor problems, but nothing catastrophic.

Then I tried replying to this post... it didn't quote your message.

Putting in the flash drive back now.

"Tae Song" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news7A72456-5C8E-4027-8DE5-(E-Mail Removed)...
>
> "measekite Da Monkey" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
> news:FfUXl.5841$(E-Mail Removed)...
>
>
> Good question... so I pulled out the flash drive.
>
> I started up Outlook (which today's service pack for Office XP fixed. In
> Office XP, Outlook does not work if you don't already have Outlook Express
> installed. It hadn't worked till early today after the latest update. I
> never installed Outlook Express on this Vista system.) I gave me an error
> message it couldn't create Normal.dot or something. I didn't make a note
> of it, sorry. It didn't display normally. Address bar/field displays
> outlook:today, but in the main window it's says Navigation to the webpage
> was canceled. Under that, it says What you can try: bullet Retype the
> address.
>
> I Open up Word everything seems to be working OK. Few minutes later
> message says, "Saving the AutoRecovery file is postponed for Normal.dot."
>
> I opened Access, Power Point, Excel, GIMP (which took much longer than
> normal to open). Some minor problems, but nothing catastrophic.
>
> Then I tried replying to this post... it didn't quote your message.
>
> Putting in the flash drive back now.
>
>

OK, I plugged the flash drive in Process Monitor pops up with an error
message... Out of memory: Unable to allocate a memory block of size 8388608.
Clicked OK, it closes.

ClipMagic says The file
:C\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\ClipMagic\clipmagic.qdb is corrupt. Disable
automatic backups and restore. Clicked OK, it's still running.

Some minor problems, but nothing major.

"Pegasus [MVP]" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
>
> "Tae Song" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
> news:E4A312C4-33A9-4FD8-8FF7-(E-Mail Removed)...
>>I thought I would share this with you all, a few little tricks to boost
>>Windows performance.
>
> Seeing that flash drives are much slower than hard disks, I wonder if your
> measures have the desired effect. Could we have some performance figures,
> complete with the test methods you applied so that anyone can perform the
> same tests on his machine?
>

You have to take in to account access hard drives are mechanical and have
access time of ms, where as flash drives have an access time down in to
nanoseconds.