Hey everyone, this may be old news to a few of you, but I hope it helps a couple of you.
You know you can use memory cards to ‘expand’ the memory of your netbook right? I’ve got an 8GB stick in side of mine with a swap of about 3-4 GB (it could be bigger, but that is all the space free). I have to say, the few instances of slowdown that were there before (i.e when I had a graphically intensive game, a bunch of windows open and was trying to listen to music and install drivers kinda thing) have all but vanished.
For me, it’s a fantastic discovery. If you didn’t know about it and want to try, you have to plug in a usb stick (up to 2.5 x your real memory is allowed i.e. if you have 1 GB then 2.5 GB stick, 2GB, 5GB Max). A point of note is that SD cards don’t work for some reason. At least my ‘ultra’ and Class 6 SDHC don’t… haven’t worked out why, perhaps yours would?. But anyway, you right click on your usb in your computer in windows explorer (the normal file browser, not internet explorer), and go to properties. Then you have a tab at the top called ‘readyboost’. There may be a sign telling you your stick isn’t fast enough, but if it is fast enough, there will be a slider to allow you to choose the size of your swap file. It gives you a recommended size, but I stuck it to maximum straight away. However, if you do this, remember that flash cards/sticks can run out after 10,000 rewrites or so, so acting as a swap will probably reduce the life of your card/ stick, but more iportantly, might corrupt data on it.
**********Thus I recommend a backup of important docs first *******
Still, I know this is old hat to a lot of Vista users, but as a mac convert convert, it’s new to me. Makes it run so smoothly 🙂
Oh, one thing, it didn’t affect my vista score. Don’t know why, guess it doesn’t take into account usb memory. But it certainly feels smoother. What do you guys think?