Readyboost or ram?

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Hi all,

I've got a bit of a issue, My mums pc has vista business on it and the machine has 512MB ddr memory in it. Its a little bit sluggish so I went online to buy some more ram I was shocked with the prices they seemed to have almost doubled in a short space of time for ddr 3200. Now I'm happy to get either 512MB stick of ram or a 1GB usb key with readyboost to use instead.

As I've currently had no experience with readyboost (although im buying a 2gig stick for myself to squeeze some more VMs on my study rig) which would produce a better result do you think.

Readyboost or Ram!?

 

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It looks like I've found my answer after a bit of googling, with a similar system spec as quoted in the test it appears the improvements favour ram slightly, although the difference means its down to cost now for me.

]. A system with 512 MB of RAM (the minimum for Windows Vista) can see significant gains from ReadyBoost. In one test case speeding up an operation from 11.7 seconds to 2 seconds (increasing physical memory from 512 MB to 1GB reduced it to 0.8 seconds). [2]. Systems with 1 GB or more do not show a significant effect on tests to date.

 

I'd always say if possible, get RAM. Problem is if you can't afford it, then its a choice between struggling with the Laptop as it is until you can afford it, or getting Readyboost. Although Readyboost will speed things up, you'd probably end up getting RAM at some point in the future anyway!

 

RAM is almost always going to be faster than using ReadyBoost. If you can stick more RAM in, its better than doing this. Readyboost is essentially just a pagefile - except that its stored on the USB stick, which is faster to read/write to than the HDD. Its not, however, usually faster than reading/writing directly to the RAM itself.

There may be cases where this is incorrect, but most of the time I believe that it is actually right.

 

Another vote for more RAM.

 

Is this DDR2 ram or DDR1 ram @ 3200?

DDR2 has dropped tremendously in price.. when I got my first DDR2 6400 2GB it cost me 170 quid a pop, I just got a 4GB Kit for < 80 quid

You can run higher rated RAM at the lower clock speeds, but you cant run DDR2 in a DDR1 system,

 

It's my understanding that 'readyboost' only moves the 'superfetch cache' to the flash drive. Whilst this may in some circumstances show a performance increase it's not equal to adding more RAM.

I vote RAM

 

Yet another vote for more RAM.

 

I always thought RAM was best so I would get RAM.

 

Thanks for all the suggestions chaps, I think I will go for both in the end, just that im rather interested to see what a difference readyboost makes. If I understand it correctly it uses the flash drives for random access but still uses the vm for sequential reads and uses superfetch to try and figure out what you are most likely going to need and when.

I'll give readyboost a whirl and then maybe a bit more ram on payday, im sure ddr 3200 prices have increased alot since I last looked hav'nt they?

 

you only see performance increase with ready boost if you have less than 2gb of ram and you have to use ready boost memory which is faster and more expensive. From what i understand is it copies small files that is used to start the o/s to the usb drive and accesses them from there instead of the hard disk. usb memory is only quicker when it comes to smaller files as the usb memory is only quicker when it comes to access times and burst transfer rates. i don't think the o/s uses the flash drive like it uses ram, so tbh you'd probably be better off with some more ram.

Grim