Use your USB Pen Drive as RAM in Windows Vista

Windows Vista provides us with a feature called ReadyBoost. This feature enables us to make use of our pendrive as RAM, so that we can increase the performance of our PC.

This is how we can use ReadyBoost:
1. Plug in your PenDrive.
2. Open Computer
3. Right-click on the removable storage device and select Properties.
4. Click on the ReadyBoost tab.
5. Select "Use This Device" and "set the amount of space u want to use as RAM"
6. Click OK.
7. Bingo !! You are done.

Use Your USB Pen Drive As RAM in Windows XP

We all know about using USB flash drive as RAM on Windows Vista. If somebody doesn't knows wait for my next post.

It would be great for us if we can use the same feature available on Windows XP? That would be a great alternative for most of the xp users who can not upgrade their old systems and running new softwares is not possible as they are equipped with a low RAM. So this nice software tool to use USB flash drives as RAM on Windows XP O/S is very useful.

This useful tool is developed by eBoostr and the trial version is available for free to download. This is an unlimited trial version, but you can only use it for 4 hours continuously. If you want to use for more than 4 hours, you need to restart your system. You can make your system run faster without making any further investment.

It is just 2.3MB to download. It supports Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 and is available in 39 languages. It requires USB 2.0 drive or memory card for operation and USB 1.1 is not supported as they tend to be very slow.

Download eBoostr
Source: www.eboostr.com

Formating USB Pen / Flash Drive with NTFS : A Guide

By default windows allows to format pen drive with fat or fat32 file system which can not store files larger than 4 GB. But nowadays we have larger USB drives as well as transfer files more than 4GB such as DVD or dual layer DVD image. NTFS does not have such issues, more reliable and can store files larger than 4 GB.

Follow the procedure stated below to format your pen drive with NTFS. Make sure you take backup of all your files before proceeding.

Plug in your pen drive.
Right click on My Computer.

Click on Properties > Hardware > Device Manager.

Expand Disk Drives & Click on your Pen Drive Name.

Now Right click on your pen drive name & select Properties.

Go to Polocies Tab & Select Optimize for Performance.

Click OK. Close device Manager.

Now open My Computer & Select Your USB / Pen Drive. Right click on it & select Format. Click on File system box. You see the NTFS option.
Now select NTFS & fromat your pen drive.

You can also convert your pen drive’s fat file system to ntfs as you use to convert fat partion to nfts.
Open command prompt and type the following command and press Enter Key.
convert x: /fs:ntfs
x is the drive letter of your USB Drive

Taking proper care of a Pen Drive / USB Drive

well guys now a days pen drives are really cheap and have become most sought after ways of data transfer. below are some points to just have a look at

1. life
only thing(apart from normal wear and tear) the affects life of a usb drive is write cycles.
u can read data from a drive any no of times u want but writing a data to it will decrease its life by a bit.writing includes deleting/defragmenting etc.thus unless sufficient space is not left in ur drive for ur new file , DONOT delete old data from it , just insert more new data.

2 defragment
unlike normal hard disks wid moving spidles , pen drives do not have slow and fast zones.data kept anywhere will be read at same speed in a pen drive.thus NEVER defrag ur pen drive as it introduces one more write cycle and reduce life of ur pen drive (by just a little bit).
also usb drives don't have any head that needs to move its position (thus wasting time to read a fragmented file on an a hard drive drive)
so no need whatsoever to defrag ur usb(or any other solid state drives)