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

[Tharkkun]

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.

Running WoW and anything else can max it at 8GB. Your OS is smart enough to manage it's memory by swapping items that don't need immediate access and disabling swap can cause unnecessary crashes.

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The reason this is faster is because your USB drive is faster than your primary HDD. So you're substituting a flash drive for swap space versus your regular drive. If you happen to have a SSD (which you were trying to avoid) the readyboost option is disabled.

Adding more ram would decrease your chance of needing constant swapping but depending on price a USB drive might be cheaper. Ram would be a better overall solution. 8 GB is practically the low end of system requirements today.

[Zstr]

better just buy SSD drive for whole prespective
since I bought mine I don't have any slows with WoW ,even some lags inside has gone, and other application and games

[Speaker]

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.

Those are just the theoretical limits of those interfaces. For example, my 1 TB Caviar Black hard drive has a 6 gb/s interface, but in real world practice only gets around 124 MB/s sequential reads, and 62 MB/s sequential writes, but my flash drive gets 253 MB/s sequential reads, and 101 MB/s sequential writes. My flash drive has twice the speed of my 'performance' hard drive. Not to mention that the flash drive has instant access times, since there are no moving parts.

Another one to look at is the 4k random reads/writes. My hard drive gets 0.484 random reads, and 0.313 random writes. It's pathetic. My flash drive get 12.22 random reads, and 10.26 random writes.

[Kokolums]

As a stress test, I've got 11 tabs open in chrome, the battle net desktop app, 1 char logged into their WoW garrison and 1 char logged into D3 standing in tristram. Its a little slow at first when i alt tab in but quickly catches up and is fine.

[procne]

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.

More RAM is not an option for everyone. 1.5 year ago I was stuck with playing on a laptop bought in 2010. Problem was that its mainboard supported 4GB RAM max, and the laptop came with OEM win 7 32bit. I still used that laptop at work few months ago until I finally got new one. If I knew about this trick earlier I could save myself a lot of nerves ^^

[Kokolums]

More RAM is not an option for everyone. 1.5 year ago I was stuck with playing on a laptop bought in 2010. Problem was that its mainboard supported 4GB RAM max, and the laptop came with OEM win 7 32bit. I still used that laptop at work few months ago until I finally got new one. If I knew about this trick earlier I could save myself a lot of nerves ^^

Very true. I've played wow and d3 on slow computers and regularly checked forums for tips tricks and advice and never ever saw anyone mention the Readyboost feature until I happened to stumble upon it yesterday.

[galileoacosta]

Im doing this with a 4gb SD card, it seems to be working, TY OP.

[Grimbold21]

I think im gonna get a 16gb flash drive and see if the difference is significant compared to a 4gb one.

[Deleted]

You are a genius, thanks for showing this so much! I'm using a shitty pendrive but for this I might just buy a 16GB one to see how much faster it gets!

[Grimbold21]

I acquired a 16gb - labeled as 16 but the real space available is 14.4gb - and for some reason it only allows 4094mb to be used. It doesn't let me go higher than that.

Edit: I think i solved it but formating in the fashion the OP mentions back in the 1st page (exFAT and 1024kb).

[Ratboy]

I'm going to have to give this a try on my work PC as I'm not able to get more RAM for it.

[ttak82]

This is an interesting thread.

I would like to know if this method can eliminate error 132 fatal exception errors as well as nvidia driver crashes. I also use a laptop with a 540M card (which shows its @$$ only in wow.. well ok also in HoTS, but thats in beta). I will try it out though.
Any input on that will be useful.

[Kokolums]

Added a section on watching meters track your Readyboost performance using meters built into Win 7!

[Deleted]

this will make my fps go higher?

[Kivana]

Tried this with a 4GB MicroSD card in an adaptor plugged into a USB drive and it works. Youtube loads instantly and so do my games, thanks for this tip

[Kokolums]

Tried this with a 4GB MicroSD card in an adaptor plugged into a USB drive and it works. Youtube loads instantly and so do my games, thanks for this tip

You're Welcome!

To everyone else, you're welcome too!

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this will make my fps go higher?

Quite possibly.

1. How much RAM do you have?
2 what hard drives are you using? a regular spinning disc? a flash memory hard drive?

[Spiralphoenix]

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 figured the same, with the same reasoning as yours. As for a source...

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/.../ff356869.aspx

Windows 7 supports Windows ReadyBoost. This feature uses external USB flash drives as a hard disk cache to improve disk read perfor¬mance. Supported external storage types include USB thumb drives, SD cards, and CF cards. Since ReadyBoost will not provide a perfor¬mance gain when the primary disk is an SSD, Windows 7 disables ReadyBoost when reading from an SSD drive.

[Deleted]

You're Welcome!

To everyone else, you're welcome too!

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Quite possibly.

1. How much RAM do you have?
2 what hard drives are you using? a regular spinning disc? a flash memory hard drive?

regular and 8 Gb, but i still lag when too much stuff is open, chrome and stuff

[Kokolums]

regular and 8 Gb, but i still lag when too much stuff is open, chrome and stuff

Yes it should help. Even a cheap 16 GB flash drive in USB 2.0 will help. Its a faster drive than a regular drive and chrome, wow, and stuff will all run faster!

[Narwhalosh Whalescream]

amd with 4gb ram.. that's probably why your computer doesn't run wow so well.....

My laptop has 2gb ram and it does "fine".