XP Hack: Readyboost with any USB Device
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Just as you can hack Vista registry to take advantage of Vista ReadyBoost feature, you can use this simple guide to ‘activate’ ReadyBoost like features in Windows XP as well.
Right click on My Computer, go to Properties, and then navigate to the Advanced or Performance tab.
After you have reached this point, follow the images below.
Once you have reached the screen above, select your flask drive, and add it to your virtual memory (paging size is up to you).
*It is recommend making a partition just for file swaping (if using a hard drive instead of a flask drive), so that system fragmentation won?t force the swap file to fragment as well.
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October 4th, 2007 at 5:10 am
It’s beyond my skill level, but a batch file to enable and disable the flash pagefile would be useful. Nice idea thou.
October 23rd, 2007 at 5:41 am
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February 7th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Dah!
Anyone can set up a USB drive with a page file.
Questions:
Does the USB drive have to be present at boot up?
What will XP do if it’s not?
What happens if someone pulls out the USB drive accidentally?
This “hack” has issues.
A freeware/shareware utility to emulate Vistas readyBoost on XP would be better.
Folcrom.
October 25th, 2008 at 9:46 am
Another one author that thinks that placing pagefile to flash in XP = ReadyBoost in Vista.
1. Pagefile behavior differs in V and XP. Your flash will be just eaten fast, probably even wo performance gain, because XP doesn’t care what will be written there, while flash has advantage for many small files due to high random rw.
2. You pull it out - you crash the system. In ReadyBoost flash stores _cache_ of some part of pagefile. You pull it out - V goes to HDD.
I could only find eBootstr for XP. 24-29-39$ looks too much for me
March 13th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
The settings will not persist across restarts. XP sets up its swap before it loads its usb drivers. It sees the swap set to a drive that is not (yet) present, and sets it back to C:.
What you would need is some way to set the swap file to the flash drive after windows finished loading. Perhaps a batch file in the startup folder if it can even be done from dos. I’d love to know if it can.
June 11th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
LOVE your site, will visit again
Submitted this post to Google News Reader.
July 22nd, 2009 at 1:33 am
This shows pictures of Vista dialogue boxes. My flash drive is not enumerated in XP (x64 service pack 2) dialogue box; therefore cannot be used as a pagefile repository. If anyone can actually see their flash drive in this dialogue box in any version of XP please post up.