Just started looking into buying a high capacity USB memory stick (well, perhaps 8GB) to give my newish desktop a wee helping hand – there’s barely anything on it and it’s already beginning to struggle a bit with Lightroom and Photoshop.

I will eventually get round to getting some more RAM but in the meantime, can someone point me at a suitable USB memory stick please? I’m a bit clueless when it comes to USB sticks…..

I’ve had a quick look round Google and it looks like it will help a little – unless anyone knows better?

can’t believe it’ll be anywhere near as fast to access a USB (2?) stick as it would be to have more “proper” memory

I’m wondering if there was ever any point to this, the fastest USB stick is still going to be slower than a SATA hard disk unless it’s hopelessly fragmented or old.

If you think your hard-disk is the bottleneck then you would be better off looking at an SSD drive – 64GB ones can be had for around £80 and may improve boot and application load times (I bought one recently and notice a significant difference).

On the other hand, if it is RAM you are running out of you are better of just getting some more RAM.. faster HD/SSDs may make things slightly quicker as things are swapped between the HD and RAM (via the swap file) but probably not noticeably..

How much RAM do you have? Is it showing that you are using most of it in the Windows Task Manager (right-click on the Taskbar and select Task Manager and then look at the Performance tab)..?

It does work, but only if you have little RAM. If you have 4Gb or above, it does nothing.

I found benchmarks for it when I was researching a while ago.

If you have a new-ish desktop then it should not struggle, there’s something wrong with it. Fitting ready-boost would be like having the ports polished in your engine when there’s a ship’s anchor tied to the back of your car.

Thanks for the responses. So far as I understand it, readyboost is only supposed to help a bit whilst doing mundane tasks.

frogstomp – am I right in thinking an SSD drive would just work in tandem with the C drive? Is it difficult to set up, or is it plug and play? Never heard of swap files, and that makes me nervous 🙂

The drop in performance only happens when I’m processing big chunks of photos. It used to churn through them at a rate of knots but has slowed considerably in the last month. Done all the usual things; killed daft startup progs, backed up stuff I don’t need everyday and deleted it, ran a disc cleanup and all that…. I only have one game installed – it’s very much a work machine.

It’s a 500 GB hard drive with 350 free. The RAM is showing as 2807 total MB, 1676 available and 122 free. That’s just running IE. Is that normal?

Second the SSD option, makes a massive difference to boot times and general system ‘snappiness’… best £80 I’ve spent on my PC (lately) to be honest…

Install Windows 7, Photoshop and Lightroom on the SSD, use it as a boot / main program drive, then use your 500GB drive for storage and anything else.

Installing a drive is pretty easy, plenty of info on the web, or a competent friend could help out?

It used to churn through them at a rate of knots but has slowed considerably in the last month

Then there’s something wrong. Don’t mess about upgrading stuff until you fix what’s wrong!

Computers don’t wear out, and having more things installed doesn’t slow it down unless you are actually running those things.

What Molgrips said, both times.

Lightroom and Photoshop can both be memory-intensive applications. I’d consider a RAM upgrade first of all (after establishing that there’s no software problems on there). A faster disk will speed up paging operations, but more memory will help prevent some of those paging operations from being needed in the first place.

Hmm. Cheers again to all. I’ll pop the case open tomorrow and order some new RAM then – cheapest option too – can’t be bad 🙂 Did this years ago for an old machine – is it still just a case of googling the serial number on the RAM, then hitting the ‘Buy’ button?

Is there good RAM and rubbish RAM?

Currently running super antispyware, just in case….

user-removed – Currently running super antispyware, just in case….

Are you running any other anti-virus / spyware etc. applications.. they often have a habit of getting in each others way, resulting in severe performance degradation. Try turning them all off and see if that makes a noticeable difference..

As for RAM, check out Crucial and MrMemory.. they have wizards on the sites to help you determine what RAM you need. This will also be dependent on how many RAM slots on your motherboard are already in use.

Are you running Norton or McAffee? They have a reputation for going nuts and slowing the system down to a crawl.

I can’t stress this enough – get your system back running the way it was BEFORE you had a problem before you start throwing new bits at it!

simonfbarnes – Member

I’m wondering if there was ever any point to this, the fastest USB stick is still going to be slower than a SATA hard disk unless it’s hopelessly fragmented or old.

It is supposed to improve small/random accesses only.

I think it is supposed to aid the situation where a system is getting low on available memory, and so releases all its disk cache.

highly recommend mrmemory. Ordered some for gf’s desktop a couple of weeks ago… ordered early afternoon, despatched within a couple of hours, here next day.

either look on the memory in your machine for the label on the memory sticks for the type, or use the configurator if you have an off-the-shelf pc.

I’d try running independently (i.e. switch off all other virus/spyware searching progs) and run them one at a time… malware & viruses are classic computer slow-downs…

Readyboost puts some of the swap file onto SSD, because it’s much better at lots of small random reads which is what swap file usage typically is.

It’s clearly not as good as more ram, since more ram means much less swap file usage to begin with. Also clearly not as good as an entire SSD disk. However it’s far cheaper than both of those, and may be the only option in some cases.

All good stuff thanks! I’ve only ever bothered with MSE – I downloaded SAS last night just to see if it would find anything that MSE has missed. It didn’t and I shall uninstall it today. It really is just used for work, STW and Radio 4 so hopefully hasn’t picked anything nasty up!

Molgrips – I hear what you’re saying re sorting the machine but more RAM can’t hurt. If it’s still like molasses in winter, I’ll get a mate of mine in to have a look.

Cheers all!

More ram is always good, but definitely have someone who knows take a look. Or buy PC tuning for dummies or something and learn up 🙂

Usually just a case of opening the task manager and seeing what’s got loads of CPU or memory usage.

If you go down the Readyboost path, ensure the USB stick is compatible.

Not every USB stick is.