Fortifies the over forties.

Are you beginning to slow down and starting to feel bloated. Do you need a ready boost for your system to get rid of the sluggishness. Maybe for you it's Sanatogen the drink that "fortifies the over forties" and your tipple of choice. 

However as I am actually wittering on about computers so now you are probably wondering what this is all about.

On Rosie we have a laptop which is quite limited for memory. (it has other things in common with me) Recently we decided to upgrade the operating system to Windows 7. There were no problems encountered and the install worked just fine. I then spent some time doing the patching and upgrading on the Windows Update web site.

In common with most things in the world of computer applications. The software now begins to out perform the available hardware resources. In other words the computer needs some additional memory to improve its performance. I need to double the amount of memory available in the computer. This means I have to throw away the existing memory and replace with new. (All the memory slots are full) This is not a cheap option and stripping down the laptop to replace the memory is not easy on this one (all the casing and keyboard needs to be removed)

Then I remembered ReadyBoost the quick and dirty fix for memory problems that I used to tell students about. Students would always arrive with either the latest all singing and dancing laptop (£800 a pop) or something quite ancient that the family had been using for years. USB Memory sticks (aka thumb drive or flash drive) have long since replaced the single (often ancient) floppy disk that students would use throughout their whole time at Uni to back up all their work. The memory stick however is a very good ReadyBoost device.

For a ReadyBoost device to be useful :-

The removable media's capacity must be at least 256 MB  The bigger the memory available the better. The device must have an access time of 1 ms or less. Most memory sticks will beat this timing easily. Microsoft recommends the amount of flash memory for ReadyBoost to be one to three times the amount of memory (RAM) in your computer.

To turn ReadyBoost on:-

Plug a flash drive or flash memory card into your computers USB Port.

Highlight the USB memory stick and choose properties.

In the Autoplay dialog box, under General options, click Speed up my system.

In the Properties dialog box, click the ReadyBoost tab, then do the following:-

To use the maximum available space on the flash drive or memory card for ReadyBoost, click Dedicate this device to ReadyBoost. Windows will leave any files already stored on the device, but it'll use the rest to boost your system speed. To use less than the maximum available space on the device for ReadyBoost, click Use this device, and then move the slider to choose the amount of available space on the device you want to use. Then click OK.

NOTE: If you turn on your computer and you get the message "No bootable partition on device" Remove the memory stick and re-boot in the normal way. When windows loads replace the memory stick. You will get this problem if the boot order in the BIOS has "Boot from external device" higher in the table than "Boot from Hard Drive"

You can either edit the boot table order (Usually by pressing F12) when you turn on the computer. Then change the boot order so Hard Drive comes before External device and then press F10 to save and exit. Alternatively just remember to unplug the memory stick whenever turning on the computer. 

Later....