USB sticks as additional RAM

[Firon]

I am have dell desktop, when i open any application it takes too much time. It has 512 mb ram and now i want to know increase my ram. Can i use USB sticks as additional RAM. Any recommendations and suggestions are appreciated.

[MattyBoy]

Random Access Memory is use to increase computer speed. Portable devices using solid state RAM can hold data for long periods, either as a backup for safekeeping or to transfer data between systems. These are electronic memory and always very faster than magnetic storages. There are two main forms in use, USB flash drives or memory cards.

[Sebastian.j]

Segon Turbo Flash Drive is a small size makes it extremely portable, and it supports Windows Ready Boost to give you that added memory when you run low on physical memory on your computer. it connects to the host computer via a USB 2.0 interface, thus being able to attain data transfer speeds of up to 480 Mbps.

[SecRecy]

When your ram is not connected to a power source it loses the information on it.ReadyBoost is also used to facilitate SuperFetch, an updated version of Windows XP's prefetcher which performs analysis of boot-time disk usage patterns, More RAM and ReadyBoost have two completely different effects. More RAM doesn't speed up loading Vista. Using ReadyBoost-capable flash memory (NAND memory devices) for caching allows Windows Vista to service random disk reads with performance that is typically 80-100 times faster than random reads from traditional hard drives.

[xaler]

I have a similar system with Vista+1.8GHz+5400RPM+512MB RAM to which I added a 4GB-ReadyBoost Device USB stick. The only criteria being that the USB stick must be ReadyBoost capable. Not all USB sticks capable for acting as additional cache devices. Vista creates a ReadyCache file for faster data access... Performance improves, but not necessarily heavy performance improvement.

You can get better performance if you can minimize the number of services. If you running vista, try to bring down the memory usage. Keep the memory usage to about 250MB or less for the OS after starting up. I get about 250MB memory usage about a minute after Vista boots up.