Another Day With My PC

Is your computer suffering from memory loss?

If I’m not mistaken, the minimum memory requirement for Windows XP is 128MB. That was quite big during the time when Vista’s predecessor was first released. Those who upgraded from 64MB to 128MB even thought that any application would run seamlessly in their unit considering that the amount of their RAM could virtually hold almost any application regardless of their size.

Unfortunately for us, software developers created programs which are RAM-gluttons. 128MB of RAM now seems to be inadequate. Despite the limitation, Windows could still keep things going through its ability to create virtual memory by using available space in the hard drive. While this solution saves users from having to purchase additional memory modules, it creates another problem – laggardness.

Accessing information in the hard drive is not as fast as when it is done in your system’s RAM. As a result, pages freeze for a few seconds whenever it is being written and accessed in the virtual memory.

Thanks to the development of flash drives, the new Microsoft OS does not have to rely on the old technique of expanding limited RAM. Windows Vista can now use flash drives as alternative RAMs to boost system performance. All that has to be done is to activate the OS’ ReadyBoost feature to utilize the flash drive as an additional memory module.

While Vista is a performance-hogger, it does make up for its gluttonous tendencies by utilizing peripherals as means or tools by which it could optimize the performance of the PC. I’m glad the guys who made Vista came up with this idea. It’s quite hard and expensive to add a few memory modules. This goes double for those who use laptops like I do. With ReadyBoost, all I have to do to spare my hard drive from being overworked is to stick a flash drive in my USB port. It’s that simple.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 1:34 pm and is filed under PC Optimization, Vista . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.