I picked up a 2GB usb drive tonight.

I plugged it in and vista asked if I wanted to run memory boost. I wanted to try it.......what a difference! I attributed the slow loading of my internet to the wireless card limitations. I assumed it would be alot slower than regular cable.

The USB drive makes a significant differnece in page load speed.

BTW I have 2GB ram internal already.

The only bummer is it is another dingleberry hanging out the side of the computer.

 

You are using WIFI to connected to a cable connection? The WIFI network is much faster than your link the Internet so that should never have been a problem. That is unless you have a very bad signal of course. That is interesting that any additional memory over 2gb is giving you increased performance in the web browser. Are you running other applications while surfing the net?

 

I wish I could get my 2 GB Sandisc thumb drive to work with my brand Dell 1720 Vista laptop.

It works with all my other PCs and the ones at work, but the laptop at home only shows the F drive portion of it, the OS.
It will not show the G portion of it which is all the files you can add to the thumb drive.

It never installed the software for it which the OS is suppose to do.
Vista sees it as a Sandisc, but only the OS portion of it.

I have heard of using a thumb drive in Vista as a memory boost.

 

Using a AT&T wireless usb card. It is through my cell phone provider.

Mine is a sandisk cruizer 2gb, worked fine for me.

I usually have ituens running. Most of the internet stuff i do would be pictures in e-mails etc..

 

I hate Vista.

Just thought I'd throw that in there.

 

It still gives me issues.... but all in all I like it so far.

I am a novice user though

 

I can't tell you how many programs I have that conflict in some way with my Vista OS. As soon as I can, I'm going back to XP. As far as my needs go, I see no advantage to Vista other than aesthetics.

Sorry, didn't mean to hijack. Just had a bunch of issues today, so I'm a little annoyed by it...

 

My thoughts... I was going to install XP on the laptop, but I figure I might as well familiarize myself with vista now, so I know the quirks.

A few things:
I don't have a lot of legacy software. I have a mapping program I am going to try and use, but not now.

I have not had a computer at home for several years, my work machine is maintained by the IT guys, so I pretty much don't do anything myself.

I am really starting from scratch so I probably won't have the same issues as the rest of you guys struggling to use legacy software and hardware.

I'm not a gamer either. The most processing I will use will be mapping stuff

Taco- Relax dude! don't be such a vista hater bro, it's all good..... Just count to 10. Think of when vista is being slow akin to being in 4low

 

why did you feel the need to share that?




The boost is nice, but as stated, I can't stand the thing hanging out of my comp like that when I am using the laptop on my lap. on the table, it's cool.

 

See the end of post #7.

I apologize to any Vista fans. I am excusing myself from this thread immediately.

 

sorry to jump down your throat...

 

No worries. Now that I have completely jacked this thread, I'd like to give everyone a and return this thread to it's original destination.

I may have been running low on coffee that day.

 

im sorry, but wats this memory boost you speak of?

 

when you plug a flash drive into a Visto OS computer, it will give you an option to run it as storage like normal or to use it like virtual RAM. It increases the speed of your computer just like adding another 2 gigs (or however big your flash is) of RAM to your computer.

 

really? thats awesome! if only i could do that with my mp3 player... it took a dump... the computer reads it, but says it needs to be formatted... and the MP3 play6er says 'boot error, shutting down now" on the screen.. if only i could use that as virtual memory lol

 

Readyboost is great, it really helps with overall system responsiveness. It doesn't have anything to do with Wi-Fi or Internet bandwith - it acts as a supplemental cache for virtual memory. Hard drives are great for doing sequential reads, but for random reads the seek times make the HDD perform much slower - you can recognize this if you hear your hard drive churning away when you open up a program or file. The USB thumb drives perform seek much quicker, and that makes the system appear much more responsive.

To set it up with Vista, all you have to do is plug in your USB thumb drive. Vista runs a quick test on it to ensure that its performance is up to snuff (many cheapo flash drives are not quick enough to realize any performance gains) and then asks you if you'd like to use the device for Readyboost. Simple and effective, even on machines with as much as 2GB of memory. It really shines if you're running less than that. If you're running Vista x64 with 4GB of memory you won't much improvement at all.

~Bill

 

best of both worlds... http://www.softpedia.com/get/Desktop...ico-Pack.shtml

 

You, my friend, are awesome.