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  1. Member Soopafresh's Avatar
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    "eBoostr™ allows you to use an additional drive (flash memory or hard disk) as another layer of performance-boosting cache for your Windows XP®. There is no need to purchase a Vista upgrade to get the benefits of the Vista’s ReadyBoost® technology. With the newly developed eBoostr™, the booting of your OS and applications startup get much faster thanks to the smart caching mechanism."

    http://www.eboostr.com/

    I'm gonna try it out and I'll report back on the claims. Man, I hope it is stable... For $30, plus the cost of the USB flash drive, it's almost the cost of another GB of RAM.
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    That is a great product.
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  3. Video Restorer lordsmurf's Avatar
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    Does it actually work?
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    Well the beta version i used, worked pretty good with a 1gb flash drive.
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  5. I'm just afraid that using the slower USB interface vs the faster HDD interface could negate some or all of the benefit of the faster flash memory.

    Then there is also the fact that all flash drives do not perform the same. If I were a betting man, then I'd bet that the cheapo or no-name flash drives are slower than the more expensive ones.
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  6. Member Soopafresh's Avatar
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    Just borrowed a friend's 4GB USB thumb drive. 2.4GB of space was available on it, and eBoostr allocated a 2.5GB "eboostr.dat" file on the free space. This took around 5 minutes. Pretty nice that it doesn't destroy the existing data on the thumb drive. BTW, the enclosed help file is sparse to say the least. It isn't a difficult installation (does require 1 reboot), but it also isn't exactly intuitive either.

    Here's the hardware I'm testing it on:




    60GB Maxtor SATA HD

    Operation: I THINK what you do in order to activate the caching mechanism is to load the applications you frequently use, then hit the "Build Cache Now" button in the eBoostr control panel.



    Results: eBoostr comes with it's own performance measurement utility, so results are obviously going to be skewed in favor of eBoostr (can't really blame 'em, that's how everyone does it). What I need to do is find an app that can provide a more objective benchmark test and report back with the results.

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  7. Member Heywould3's Avatar
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    the numbers are good. but the real question is how does it act? is it faster by a large margin or do yo hardly notice it?
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  8. Member Soopafresh's Avatar
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    That's the thing. I'm testing it right now, and on a 4GB RAM machine, the performance difference isn't "in your face". Reading up on the Vista ReadyBoost technology (on which eBoostr is based), the wikipedia entry states that machines with lower amounts of RAM will see a larger increase in performance.

    "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."

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost

    If someone wants to try it on a lower end machine or laptop, please report your findings. The installation of the product was stable on an XP Pro SP2 system.
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  9. Video Restorer lordsmurf's Avatar
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    I would only care of it helps with Adobe software performance.
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  10. Member Soopafresh's Avatar
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    No difference in loading time for Photoshop or After Effects. There might be a difference if my test machine was more RAM challenged.
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  11. Member Heywould3's Avatar
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    i have a vista laptop and an XP laptop i have a kingston 1 gig and a scandisk 2 gig but they are both used atm. ill try to get around to trying it though the vista has 1 gig ram and the XP has 512 ram
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  12. Member crazy14muzic's Avatar
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    so far i like how it performs. i have a dell b120 with 256 mb ram 1.4 celeron, basically what it came with, no upgrades. i have been thinking about getting more ram for it but now this will prolong my decision short of the 4 hour demo period after each bootup. it performs really well. the bummer is that i would have to run around with this flash drive sticking out of the side for boosted performance. could be a nuisance if you move around alot but if your computer stays in one spot(desktop style) it would be great. i can also see it breathing new life into older computers(kids gaming comuters) that have the limits on how much ram they can have. is usb2 faster than the old 133 mhz p3 system ram? i have an old p3 450 system with 256 mb ram i haven't used in so long. the motherboard on that sytem can only have up to 768 mb of ram. with the cheap prices of usb2 cards and flash drives it would be no problem to get the eboosted ram through the roof. another wonder is the read/write cycles on these flash drives is so called limited, would this ebooster be the death of it?
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  13. Member Soopafresh's Avatar
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    Tried it on an older 2.2Ghz P4 with 1GB and it did make the machine more responsive. Folders "popped" open more quickly, especially ones with lots of files in them.

    I can see some benefit with older machines and especially with laptops, where adding RAM is usually a huge PITA. The docs recommend only 1GB of cache space. BTW, I discovered it can also use space on another physical hard drive for caching (even an internal drive), which would probably be even more of a boost than a thumb drive.
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  14. Member crazy14muzic's Avatar
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    use a hdd heh?! i like that my main system has five drives even if you allocate 256 mb across four of them it would kind of like having a raid ram system having four readers/writers at one time. what do you think?
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  15. Mod Neophyte Super Moderator redwudz's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by Soopafresh
    BTW, I discovered it can also use space on another physical hard drive for caching (even an internal drive), which would probably be even more of a boost than a thumb drive.
    But doesn't that sound similar to what the OS does anyway, cache files to the hard drive when it's short on RAM?

    I'm also wondering if using a USB flash drive will have an effect on a USB bus that has other USB devices connected, such a external burners or hard drives? It has to be using some USB bandwidth.

    Still, well work trying.
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  16. Member Soopafresh's Avatar
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    Try it and let us know...
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  17. Member Soopafresh's Avatar
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    But doesn't that sound similar to what the OS does anyway, cache files to the hard drive when it's short on RAM?

    I'm also wondering if using a USB flash drive will have an effect on a USB bus that has other USB devices connected, such a external burners or hard drives? It has to be using some USB bandwidth.


    Good questions, redwudz. I wish I understood the technology behind the app a little better

    What might be interesting would be to allocate some RAM as a RAMdrive and see if it will allow you to cache to that.

    Edit - Well, I answered that question. I have no idea if this is actually boosting performance, but eBoostr seems to think so.

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  18. Member Xylob the Destroyer's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by redwudz
    But doesn't that sound similar to what the OS does anyway, cache files to the hard drive when it's short on RAM? ...
    I was wondering about that too.
    Why not just jack up the size of your page file?
    "To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research." - Steven Wright
    "Megalomaniacal, and harder than the rest!"
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  19. Most likely the systems that use SDRam also have USB1.1 not 2.0 unless a add in card is installed. Such as the P4 450Mhz system mentioned would not have shipped with USB2
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    Hope this topic will continue as we find more out about eBoostr. For me the verdict isn't in; I'm still trying the demo. One thing I think is worth mentioning is that while trying out a couple different sd cards I was unable to use a 64MB card. The card is seen as a removeable drive, and like any drive doesn't have as much "available space" as its rated capacity. If this is true for any 64MB device, then eBoostr's minimum 64MB specification is a bit misleading since one would have to go to a 128MB device for the program to work at all. (Maybe not such a big deal, but could be disappointing to someone eager to try out the program who only has a 64MB available for testing purposes.) Happy Holidays, Bob
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  21. Member Soopafresh's Avatar
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    There's a newer version on the website v1.1, perhaps that one will work better.
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    i have downloaded the demo and are useing my ipod 30gb classic and allocated 4gb of space to use

    i have seen a massive change my laptop runs so smooth now and im going to buy the pro version sometime this week. i think this is a real money saver and not as much hassle

    love this programme

    p.s the minimum space on the storage devise is 256mb
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