MUST READ if your WoW runs slow / slow to alt-tab in and out

[Mad_Murdock]

Need more folks saying this works.

Does this work with a flash driver smaller than 16gb (only have a 4gb one) and does it function with windows 8?

The readyboost has been around since Windows Vista. It works great in the sense that you can make a fast USB flash drive take over your pagefile and get better performance. Arguably you could achieve the same thing with a Hybrid Harddirve that has something like a 8gb SSD intergrated.

The whole point of readyboost was to help systems that didn't have more than 4GB of ram. Your goal should be to never hit the pagefile at all. or if you do, you hit it very little. If you do have to hit the pagefile, then obviously having the pagefile on a faster flash drive is ideal. Fair number of laptop drives have the much slower 5400rpm drives which only makes things worse.

Pretty sure if you google the old articles, the answers is still get more ram. When getting more ram isn't possible, then a readyboost flashdrive is the 2nd best answer.

Now I have to look, I didn't think Win 8.1 kept ready boost because who would get Win 8 and not get at least 8GB of ram?

[MerinPally]

Ok just set it up and added 10000Mb. Will see if it works shortly when I eat dinner.

[Vanaline]

It seems like an ad because the OP is ultra nice in his post. Thats salesmany but im pretty sure its legit.

People on this board are probably not used to someone behaving like a decent human being.

[Grimbold21]

The readyboost has been around since Windows Vista. It works great in the sense that you can make a fast USB flash drive take over your pagefile and get better performance. Arguably you could achieve the same thing with a Hybrid Harddirve that has something like a 8gb SSD intergrated.

The whole point of readyboost was to help systems that didn't have more than 4GB of ram. Your goal should be to never hit the pagefile at all. or if you do, you hit it very little. If you do have to hit the pagefile, then obviously having the pagefile on a faster flash drive is ideal. Fair number of laptop drives have the much slower 5400rpm drives which only makes things worse.

Pretty sure if you google the old articles, the answers is still get more ram. When getting more ram isn't possible, then a readyboost flashdrive is the 2nd best answer.

Now I have to look, I didn't think Win 8.1 kept ready boost because who would get Win 8 and not get at least 8GB of ram?

I appreciate your explanation, alas, i have no idea what you just said

To the OP, i did almost everything you said, with the exception of the Better Performance part on the Disk Drives section, mainly due to language differences which prevent me from finding the Policies tab.

Regardless, i went ahead and did the rest and i think i notice a difference. I will post later as i test it further with WoW and Chrome both open.


Another question is, what are the side effects of using this measure? Things like these are usually too good to be true and end up affecting your hardware or warever in a negative way.

[Xaryen]

No idea how this worked since I have 8GB RAM, but it really made everything noticably faster O_o ty very much OP
edit: also, running on Win 8.1

[Mad_Murdock]

Another question is, what are the side effects of using this measure? Things like these are usually too good to be true and end up affecting your hardware or warever in a negative way.

The good news is that there is very little side effects. Worse case is it will wear out the flash drive a little faster than obviously sitting on a shelf. Maybe the biggest side effect is that you need to keep the flash drive connected to your system, else you go back to the older slower way of things. Again, It's not really that magical of a fix, it falls more into a clever fix for those without enough ram. If you have 8+GB of ram and readyboost did anything that could be measured for you, that would be very interesting to see what else is going on.

I checked windows 8.1 and they removed readyboost, pretty sure its because no one should be installing Win 8 on a system that's below 6-8GB of ram these days. That and I believe they tweaked the way the pagefile works.

[Grimbold21]

The good news is that there is very little side effects. Worse case is it will wear out the flash drive a little faster than obviously sitting on a shelf. Maybe the biggest side effect is that you need to keep the flash drive connected to your system, else you go back to the older slower way of things. Again, It's not really that magical of a fix, it falls more into a clever fix for those without enough ram. If you have 8+GB of ram and readyboost did anything that could be measured for you, that would be very interesting to see what else is going on.

I checked windows 8.1 and they removed readyboost, pretty sure its because no one should be installing Win 8 on a system that's below 6-8GB of ram these days. That and I believe they tweaked the way the pagefile works.

I have windows 8.1 64b with a 4gb ram laptop. I can say that i've noticed a difference. I can go back and forth between WoW and chrome now without the screen going back while loading graphics.

Still, i've only done BGs and i guess the true test lies in raids or Ashran.

[Bodom]

Interesting! I need to try this.

[procne]

No idea how this worked since I have 8GB RAM, but it really made everything noticably faster O_o ty very much OP
edit: also, running on Win 8.1

I think you should simply disable your pagefile
With 8 GB RAM you shouldn't really need it.
Pagefile is required when your apps use more RAM than your PC has.

[DaveL]

First of all, are you running with 4Gb RAM on 32bit Win7? if your answer is yes, then there is no wondering about having those problems..

[Kokolums]

The good news is that there is very little side effects. Worse case is it will wear out the flash drive a little faster than obviously sitting on a shelf. Maybe the biggest side effect is that you need to keep the flash drive connected to your system, else you go back to the older slower way of things. Again, It's not really that magical of a fix, it falls more into a clever fix for those without enough ram. If you have 8+GB of ram and readyboost did anything that could be measured for you, that would be very interesting to see what else is going on.

I checked windows 8.1 and they removed readyboost, pretty sure its because no one should be installing Win 8 on a system that's below 6-8GB of ram these days. That and I believe they tweaked the way the pagefile works.

This video claims Readyboost is in Windows 8.1. I cannot verify that as I do not have a Windows 8.1 system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ityh7l7hnRA

[Blupr]

im actually so happy right now, my garrison used to load so slow especially all the props in my townhall etc and /reload took forever (like 30, 40sec sometimes)

Now it;s super fast

[DaveL]

This video claims Readyboost is in Windows 8.1. I cannot verify that as I do not have a Windows 8.1 system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ityh7l7hnRA

yes it is, but its not that obvious like in Vista/Win7

[Mad_Murdock]

This video claims Readyboost is in Windows 8.1. I cannot verify that as I do not have a Windows 8.1 system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ityh7l7hnRA

Yes, I see where I was mistaken. I was looking under "Services" which is where they had it under Windows Vista. Looking at windows 7 and 8.x looks like it's not longer a service by itself.

I'm still interested in claims that it is help machines with 8GB or more of ram. That would imply those systems are really being taxed. Here is Microsoft's own definition of what ready boost is "Just plug in a USB flash drive or card and let ReadyBoost borrow it. ReadyBoost is designed to help when your PC's memory is running low"

I tried readyBoost back in the day, but never got much, if any, performance gains. I've been running 8GB for a while, so I've never been RAM starved. Granted older laptops are more tricky, but I'd invest in a SSD drive, before being tied to a flash drive hanging off my laptop. I'm still interested how someone with 8Gb would get any noticeable improvement. Guess I'll have to dig into this more when I'm bored.

Only theory I have, is maybe some of these hard drives are massively fragmented with porn and windows has moved large chunks of the game data to the flash drive and that allows it to circumvented the fragmentation issues.

[Speaker]

Honestly, from my understanding, this would speed up any system that doesn't have their files stored onto something like a SSD, since reading from the flash drive is going to be much faster than reading from a hard drive, which is significantly slower. The faster the flash drive, the more the benefit, and USB 3.0 is significantly faster than USB 2.0. If you had a large enough flash drive you would probably be better off putting your whole OS onto it rather than a hard drive. Of course, you could just get an SSD, which I would recommend everyone do, at least one large enough to store your OS.

If I am wrong, I would love to know.

[Grimbold21]

But, in simple terms, what does this translate to? If i have a 4gb pc and i add a 4gb flash drive, is it running 8gb then?

[satimy]

Readyboost is ace and can be a bit ropey at times so if you are doing something like a raid i wouldn't use it but otherwise you will get improvement. Just close, remove and reopen when you want to do delicate things.

Also changed to Windowed Mode if you are tabbing alot.

Thats what I did and I get major frame drops at random times, like 75 >>> 3.

[Mad_Murdock]

Honestly, from my understanding, this would speed up any system that doesn't have their files stored onto something like a SSD, since reading from the flash drive is going to be much faster than reading from a hard drive, which is significantly slower. The faster the flash drive, the more the benefit, and USB 3.0 is significantly faster than USB 2.0. If you had a large enough flash drive you would probably be better off putting your whole OS onto it rather than a hard drive. Of course, you could just get an SSD, which I would recommend everyone do, at least one large enough to store your OS.

If I am wrong, I would love to know.

I do wonder if they tweak the way the original readyboost works. Before readyboost didn't really kick in until you were pretty much out of ram, maybe in the 3-3.5GB range on a 4GB machine. The data that was supposed to be put in the pagefile was put on the readyboost drive instead. Maybe that and SuperFetch are working together and seeing that WoW data is getting access a lot and putting it on the flash drive and most likely stays there even after reboot.

For older laptops a USB3.0 might compete with a IDE 5400 RPM drive, Especially with lots of fragmentation. a USB 3.0 flash drive shouldn't be able to beat a newer 3gb or 6gb SATA drive. The math is 480 mb/s vs 3gb,6 gb/s of course, those are best case numbers. Most of my readyboost testing was with a Desktop with 1.5gb sata drives and 8GB of ram and that was back when USB 2.0 was king.

Of course with laptops namely older laptops, lots of variables to have to consider. So maybe the best answer is, "try it" and "your mileage may vary"

But, in simple terms, what does this translate to? If i have a 4gb pc and i add a 4gb flash drive, is it running 8gb then?

Short answer is No. Longer answer is kinda (but not really)

The basics of what happens is, you system needs your WoW data. If that data is on your hard drive, it has to read that data into memory(the 4GB) if the hard drive is really slow or fragmented, what should be a 5 sec read could be a 10,15,45 sec. If you are reading so such data that your PC's memory (the 4GB) becomes full, It takes least used data out of memory and stores that in your Pagefile (aka Virtual memory) this again is normally a slower hard drive and again lots of corruption makes a 5 sec read a 45 sec read.

The readyboost\Flash drive technique moves the data you have or need onto the faster access Flash drive, because fragmentation doesn't affect it the same way, you will rarely have a 5 sec read become a 10 sec read, it will pretty much always be a 5 sec read. The flash device itself also can read and write data faster, because it's all electronic bits versus a spinning disk that has to wait for the heads to move around to the section it wants. The biggest limitation with the USB\Flash drives is that are limited by the USB bus speed is for USB 3.0 is 480 megabits a sec. So if you were moving large 10-20GB files, their performance could be a lot slower than a a 6 gigabit a sec hard drive

Most of the game data being handle is in much smaller chunks of 2K or 4K data sizes, which allows the USB 3.0 device to perform very well. SSD drives work off the SATA buses which are faster. but a PC with 4Gb of ram and a 128GB SSD drive isn't a PC with 132GB of RAM. It's 4GB of ram and 128GB of really fast data access, Basically a corvette versus a school bus

Again, a very generic overview skipping a bunch of varibles and technical babble.


If a system had a fairly clean hard drive and ample memory (8-16GB) You should not see massive performance delays when alt-tabbing windows and loading the game. Normally, with an 8GB system, the first load of the game will be slowest. but if you exited and went back in, the 2nd load will be much faster because much of the game data will still be in memory. I think some folks (with 8GB systems) might be seeing this effect and thinking it's awesome fast because of it. The best way to get a feel for how big of an impact it has, is to reboot the system between test to ensure the memory is flushed.

[ablib]

This whole thread is like an unbelievable blast from the past.

I can't believe anyone would game on a PC that would benefit from Readyboot. We're talking about a feature of Windows that came out 9 years ago.

I will never be a slave to gimmicky band aid's like Ready Boost. RAM is cheap.

[Deleted]

I spent 10 minutes setting up a VHD of 16 gigs using readyboost. Best decision ever. WoW tabs out instantly. I fucking dig it.