How to increase system system performance

[propman]

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.

Try this short paragraph for a starter:
"Modern flash drives have USB 2.0 connectivity. However, they do not
currently use the full 480 Mbit/s (60MB/s) the USB 2.0 Hi-Speed
specification supports due to technical limitations inherent in NAND flash.
The fastest drives currently available use a dual channel controller,
although they still fall considerably short of the transfer rate possible
from a current generation hard disk, or the maximum high speed USB
throughput."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive

Or this:
"A typical "desktop HDD" might store between 120 GB and 2 TB although rarely
above 500GB of data (based on US market data[14]) rotate at 5,400 to 10,000
rpm and have a media transfer rate of 1 Gbit/s or higher. Some newer have
3Gbit/s."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk

Now go and do some actual measurements before claiming that your idea will
"increase" performance. It won't.

......and that information address's the following quote how?

<quote on>
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.
<quote off>

 

[Tae Song]

Huh ??? What are you saying. For sure as I am typing this answer Outlook
works without having to have Outlook Express.

Get your answers straight Tae Song
--
Peter

Please Reply to Newsgroup for the benefit of others
Requests for assistance by email can not and will not be acknowledged.

For certain, if you install Office XP without Outlook Express on Vista.
Outlook will come back with a message saying install Outlook Express.
Outlook runs on top of Outlook Express.

I was using Windows Live Mail, so I didn't bother. I noticed they released
a service pack for Office XP today and by accident I startup Outlook and
noticed I could get in.

 

[Tae Song]

Try this short paragraph for a starter:
"Modern flash drives have USB 2.0 connectivity. However, they do not
currently use the full 480 Mbit/s (60MB/s) the USB 2.0 Hi-Speed
specification supports due to technical limitations inherent in NAND
flash. The fastest drives currently available use a dual channel
controller, although they still fall considerably short of the transfer
rate possible from a current generation hard disk, or the maximum high
speed USB throughput."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive

It says "currently" , but it doesn't say when it was written.

Microsoft offers Readyboost, so perhaps things have changed since this was
written.

Or this:
"A typical "desktop HDD" might store between 120 GB and 2 TB although
rarely above 500GB of data (based on US market data[14]) rotate at 5,400
to 10,000 rpm and have a media transfer rate of 1 Gbit/s or higher. Some
newer have 3Gbit/s."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk

Now go and do some actual measurements before claiming that your idea will
"increase" performance. It won't.

My configuration isn't going to be the same as yours.

Anyways it doesn't take any kind of test to know USB mass storage is still
very fast.

 

[Richard Urban]

Only if you want to set up to read news groups. Outlook is email only! If
you don't do news groups you don't need Outlook Express.

 

[Michael]

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.

Try this short paragraph for a starter:
"Modern flash drives have USB 2.0 connectivity. However, they do not
currently use the full 480 Mbit/s (60MB/s) the USB 2.0 Hi-Speed
specification supports due to technical limitations inherent in NAND flash.
The fastest drives currently available use a dual channel controller,
although they still fall considerably short of the transfer rate possible
from a current generation hard disk, or the maximum high speed USB
throughput."
Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive

Or this:
"A typical "desktop HDD" might store between 120 GB and 2 TB although rarely
above 500GB of data (based on US market data[14]) rotate at 5,400 to 10,000
rpm and have a media transfer rate of 1 Gbit/s or higher. Some newer have
3Gbit/s."
Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk

Now go and do some actual measurements before claiming that your idea will
"increase" performance. It won't.

Pegasus is right, I think what a lot of you don't understand about
flash memory is that it's not access speeds that are fast, it
ADRESSING (seek) speeds that are fast. Flash memory is very fast at
being able to find data within the chip itself. But there are many
more factors than just the addressing speed. First you have the USB
port which is only capable of 480 Mbit/s versus today's SATA 3.0 Gbit/
s. And both of those interfaces rarely if not never reach those ideal
values. You have to keep in mind that the controller within a USB
memory device is a huge limiting factor. The memory itself may be very
fast, but the computer isn't talking to that, it's talking to its
controller, and if you are using cheap USB sticks, then that
controller is very likely to be low quality, and slow. Go google some
benchmarks, you'll see that flash memory isn't all that fast.

Moving page file and other things away form the OS drive, that I could
see having some possible change. If you really want some significant
speed increases, check out RAIDing and don't buy cheap RAM, and use a
page file, page files do a whole lot more than dealing with minimized
programs, there are tons of background applications that don't need to
be in memory constantly because they don't do much once they are
loaded (software updaters, printer/scanner stuff, etc).

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

Folders and files in %TEMP% can grow to be larger than the total amount of
RAM...

 

[John John - MVP]

It says "currently" , but it doesn't say when it was written.

Microsoft offers Readyboost, so perhaps things have changed since this
was written.

The Readyboost cache isn't necessarily faster than the pagefile, random
reads are faster on flash drives but sequential reads are faster on hard
disks. The Memory Manager will decide which is faster and where to get
the cached information.

For sequential read and writes USB flash drives are not faster than hard
drives, they are much slower. That, along with the other "minor
problems" mentioned in your other posts, are reason enough to forget
about using this "performance" tweak.

John

 

[Pegasus [MVP]]

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.

Try this short paragraph for a starter:
"Modern flash drives have USB 2.0 connectivity. However, they do not
currently use the full 480 Mbit/s (60MB/s) the USB 2.0 Hi-Speed
specification supports due to technical limitations inherent in NAND
flash. The fastest drives currently available use a dual channel
controller, although they still fall considerably short of the transfer
rate possible from a current generation hard disk, or the maximum high
speed USB throughput."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive

Or this:
"A typical "desktop HDD" might store between 120 GB and 2 TB although
rarely above 500GB of data (based on US market data[14]) rotate at 5,400
to 10,000 rpm and have a media transfer rate of 1 Gbit/s or higher. Some
newer have 3Gbit/s."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk

Now go and do some actual measurements before claiming that your idea
will "increase" performance. It won't.

.....and that information address's [addresses?] the following quote how?

<quote on>
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.
<quote off>

Nice words but so far the OP has not offered the slightest evidence that his
idea speeds up a machine. Let's see a few tests that anyone can reproduce!

 

[Monitor]

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.

Here is how geniuses work:
1. They have a brilliant idea.
2. They test it.
3. They test it again.
4. They have it verified by someone else.
5. They publish it.
6. They enjoy the praise and the fame.

It seems you jumped from Step 1 directly to Step 5, expecting to be showered
with praise. Instead you need to scrape a lot of egg off your face.

 

[Tae Song]

Here is how geniuses work:
1. They have a brilliant idea.
2. They test it.
3. They test it again.
4. They have it verified by someone else.
5. They publish it.
6. They enjoy the praise and the fame.

It seems you jumped from Step 1 directly to Step 5, expecting to be
showered with praise. Instead you need to scrape a lot of egg off your
face.

Thank you, I thought it was good idea too.

I never expected praise, I just thought it was an idea worth trying out.

I never claim to be a genius, but thanks for the benefit of the doubt.

I eat eggs breakfast... so I can live with it.

Here is another idea, I don't know if anyone thought of it before...

How about Windows support for MAID (massive array of inexpensive drives)
using USB flash drives.

Would that be cool or what?

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Tae Song.

Most of your posts in other threads sound intelligent. And this thread
started off sounding like a possibly good idea. But then, in your third
post, you said this:

"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.)"

That paragraph lost all your credibility for me. :>(

First, of course, "Outlook does not work if you don't already have Outlook
Express" is an obviously false claim, because many of us are running
Outlook in Vista and Win7 RC. And then you said, "I never installed Outlook
Express on this Vista system." This indicates a serious lack of knowledge
of both OE and Vista, because OE cannot be installed on Vista.

At that point, I turned you off and read the rest of the thread just to see
how far you would go and whether others would correct your errors. :>( I'm
glad to see that several knowledgeable readers did.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8064.0206) in Win7 Ultimate x64 RC 7100

 

[Tae Song]

Hi, Tae Song.

Most of your posts in other threads sound intelligent. And this thread
started off sounding like a possibly good idea. But then, in your third
post, you said this:

"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.)"

That paragraph lost all your credibility for me. :>(

First, of course, "Outlook does not work if you don't already have Outlook
Express" is an obviously false claim, because many of us are running
Outlook in Vista and Win7 RC. And then you said, "I never installed
Outlook Express on this Vista system." This indicates a serious lack of
knowledge of both OE and Vista, because OE cannot be installed on Vista.

At that point, I turned you off and read the rest of the thread just to
see how far you would go and whether others would correct your errors.
:>( I'm glad to see that several knowledgeable readers did.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8064.0206) in Win7 Ultimate x64 RC 7100

Why Outlook 2002 and 2003 require Outlook Express
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287686

 

[Tom Willett]

The whole thing is a moot point. OE is always installed on the computer, and
can't be uninstalled from the O/S. You can take away access to it, but you
can uninstall it. Not without causing serious problems, anyway.

:
: : > Hi, Tae Song.
: >
: > Most of your posts in other threads sound intelligent. And this thread
: > started off sounding like a possibly good idea. But then, in your third
: > post, you said this:
: >
: > "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.)"
: >
: > That paragraph lost all your credibility for me. :>(
: >
: > First, of course, "Outlook does not work if you don't already have
Outlook
: > Express" is an obviously false claim, because many of us are running
: > Outlook in Vista and Win7 RC. And then you said, "I never installed
: > Outlook Express on this Vista system." This indicates a serious lack of
: > knowledge of both OE and Vista, because OE cannot be installed on Vista.
: >
: > At that point, I turned you off and read the rest of the thread just to
: > see how far you would go and whether others would correct your errors.
: > :>( I'm glad to see that several knowledgeable readers did.
: >
: > RC
: > --
: > R. C. White, CPA
: > San Marcos, TX
: > (e-mail address removed)
: > Microsoft Windows MVP
: > Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8064.0206) in Win7 Ultimate x64 RC 7100
: >
: > : >> I thought I would share this with you all, a few little tricks to boost
: >> Windows performance.
: >
: > <SNIP long cross-posted post full of inaccurate information and advice>
: >
: >> 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.
: >
:
:
: Why Outlook 2002 and 2003 require Outlook Express
: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287686
:
:
:

 

[Tae Song]

The whole thing is a moot point. OE is always installed on the computer,
and
can't be uninstalled from the O/S. You can take away access to it, but you
can uninstall it. Not without causing serious problems, anyway.

:
: : > Hi, Tae Song.
: >
: > Most of your posts in other threads sound intelligent. And this
thread
: > started off sounding like a possibly good idea. But then, in your
third
: > post, you said this:
: >
: > "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.)"
: >
: > That paragraph lost all your credibility for me. :>(
: >
: > First, of course, "Outlook does not work if you don't already have
Outlook
: > Express" is an obviously false claim, because many of us are running
: > Outlook in Vista and Win7 RC. And then you said, "I never installed
: > Outlook Express on this Vista system." This indicates a serious lack
of
: > knowledge of both OE and Vista, because OE cannot be installed on
Vista.
: >
: > At that point, I turned you off and read the rest of the thread just
to
: > see how far you would go and whether others would correct your errors.
: > :>( I'm glad to see that several knowledgeable readers did.
: >
: > RC
: > --
: > R. C. White, CPA
: > San Marcos, TX
: > (e-mail address removed)
: > Microsoft Windows MVP
: > Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8064.0206) in Win7 Ultimate x64 RC 7100
: >
: > : >> I thought I would share this with you all, a few little tricks to
boost
: >> Windows performance.
: >
: > <SNIP long cross-posted post full of inaccurate information and
advice>
: >
: >> 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.
: >
:
:
: Why Outlook 2002 and 2003 require Outlook Express
: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287686
:
:
:

Windows Vista doesn't come with Outlook Express at all, it comes with
Windows Mail.

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Tae Song.

You were misled by an out-of-date KB article that has not been updated to
recognize Vista, even though it says "Last Review: May 4, 2009". It applies
only to Outlook 2002 and 2003, both of which predate Vista by several years.
I'll try to bring this to the attention of someone at Microsoft to get it
corrected.

You've cross-posted to two WinXP NGs AND to two Vista NGs.

You have an excuse, but you still are wrong. :^{

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8064.0206) in Win7 Ultimate x64 RC 7100

 

[Unknown]

The whole thing is a moot point. OE is always installed on the computer,
and
can't be uninstalled from the O/S. You can take away access to it, but you
can uninstall it. Not without causing serious problems, anyway.

You meant CAN'T on this last line??????

 

[Tae Song]

Hi, Tae Song.

You were misled by an out-of-date KB article that has not been updated to
recognize Vista, even though it says "Last Review: May 4, 2009". It
applies only to Outlook 2002 and 2003, both of which predate Vista by
several years. I'll try to bring this to the attention of someone at
Microsoft to get it corrected.

You've cross-posted to two WinXP NGs AND to two Vista NGs.

You have an excuse, but you still are wrong. :^{

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8064.0206) in Win7 Ultimate x64 RC 7100

Read the through the thread, I said I have Office XP installed. Office XP
installs Outlook 2002, which didn't work until the recent Office XP update
couple days ago.

 

[Tom Willett]

:
: : > The whole thing is a moot point. OE is always installed on the computer,
: > and
: > can't be uninstalled from the O/S. You can take away access to it, but
you
: > can uninstall it. Not without causing serious problems, anyway.
: You meant CAN'T on this last line??????

Yep.
:
:

 

[Tae Song]

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

You don't need an extremely high write speed. A lot of times temp files are
just empty files, many are 0 bytes. Almost all are under 700KB. Even at a
write speed of of say a low of 5MB/s is still only a fraction of a sec.

This keeps the read/write head from thrashing about creating and updating
file records.

And just to up the ante, I enabled disk compression on the USB drives to
reduce the size of the writes.

 

[Richard Urban]

Please read what the fellow said. A USB thumb drive has a "finite" number of
read/write cycles. I have worn out 4 in the last 2-3 years. They just die.
They are NOT meant for continuous reading/writing.