Thanks Carolyn, I been looking for a way to upgrade Anne’s laptop, sounds like a USB Flash Drive is the way to go I was reading it should be USB 2.0 which I think it’s got.
Unless the RAM in the computer is not replaceable, if you include the price of the software(unless you want to reboot every 4 hours), wouldn’t it be cheaper to just upgrade the RAM?
Especially since this was the solution to “a motherboard just died and Carolyn needs a usable computer RIGHT NOW. This computer isn’t usable. How do I fix it in 5 minutes and $0?”
The $0 part being the main lynchpin. If you have to pay for ram to speed up your computer, you save time by the computer being sped up, but you waste time by working to earning the money. In this case, with a computer that gets an average of 1 day a year’s use, we’d never regain, via computer speedup, the time spent earning the money to pay for ram in the first place. And then there’s the whole “we only use this 1 day a year” [except this year].
And then there’s the whole non-infinite-pile-of-money situation. But hey…. Some people like paying extra for the same thing. I call them Apple users. And it’s not like software cracks aren’t widely available, either
April 5, 2010 at 12:19 pm
Noticeable performance increase Carolyn? I’ve been wanting to try this.
April 5, 2010 at 1:15 pm
Yes, it really made a huge difference. My laptop only had 256m, and it was VERY NOTICEABLE. With the thumbdrive, it’s not so excessively laggy
April 5, 2010 at 1:58 pm
Thanks Carolyn, I been looking for a way to upgrade Anne’s laptop, sounds like a USB Flash Drive is the way to go
I was reading it should be USB 2.0 which I think it’s got.
April 5, 2010 at 2:01 pm
It’s like a ramdisk, but even better, since flash drives are solid state instead of moving parts
DOS concepts come back 15 yrs later FTW!
April 5, 2010 at 2:05 pm
Thanks Clint, I like the idea of no moving parts – not entirely dissimilar to my head
DEVICE=C:\DOS\RAMDRIVE.SYS 4000 512 128 /E
heheheh
April 5, 2010 at 2:57 pm
Don’t you mean Ramdisk in reverse? This is turning “storage space” into “RAM”. Ramdisk did the opposite.
It’s pretty damn cool! I’m going to have to try it out on Nicole’s old laptop.
April 5, 2010 at 3:05 pm
Oh, right.
DISKRAM!
April 5, 2010 at 5:27 pm
Invariably, I’d end up RAMMING the disk into a wall or other dense object because I could never get the thing to work. Ramdisk ;P
April 6, 2010 at 12:44 am
Unless the RAM in the computer is not replaceable, if you include the price of the software(unless you want to reboot every 4 hours), wouldn’t it be cheaper to just upgrade the RAM?
April 6, 2010 at 8:11 am
Since this is a temporary setup, I chose to reboot every 4 hours.
I wouldn’t know where to start to upgrade the RAM on a laptop. It is not worth it to me to mess around with that.
April 6, 2010 at 9:52 am
Yeah I’m with Carolyn about the 4 hours being an acceptable tenure between reboots. Besides, personally, my own attention span isn’t NEARLY that long.
April 6, 2010 at 10:55 am
Yeah really.
Especially since this was the solution to “a motherboard just died and Carolyn needs a usable computer RIGHT NOW. This computer isn’t usable. How do I fix it in 5 minutes and $0?”
The $0 part being the main lynchpin. If you have to pay for ram to speed up your computer, you save time by the computer being sped up, but you waste time by working to earning the money. In this case, with a computer that gets an average of 1 day a year’s use, we’d never regain, via computer speedup, the time spent earning the money to pay for ram in the first place. And then there’s the whole “we only use this 1 day a year” [except this year].
And then there’s the whole non-infinite-pile-of-money situation. But hey…. Some people like paying extra for the same thing. I call them Apple users.
And it’s not like software cracks aren’t widely available, either 