So, Ron, are you in a position to give us a “midterm” report on eBoostr? Just wondering how you are faring and if this is looking like worthwhile, or are you going to keep this turkey in suspense until Christmas Day?!

Thanks,

Mike

Hi Mike,
So far it is working OK. I have 1G of physical RAM so the impact is minimal since I am using XP. I think if a system had 256 or even 512 MB the addition of eBoostr would be more noticeable.

With that said, I personally believe that adding physical RAM is the best option. But for those who may not want to crack open the case, eBoostr is an option to consider.

Hope this helps, Ron

Thanks Ron. I’m running XP with 2GB of RAM on an aging Centrino notebook. You’ve confirmed my suspicions about eBoostr - not likely worth it in a low RAM situation. I’ll await your full comments next week (or so)!

Many thanks,

Mike

Er… Oops! The above should read: “not likely worth it outside of a low RAM situation”. Or something like that…

Hi Mike,
I knew what you meant.

Hi,
I’m also testing eboostr on a 512MB RAM XPpro. There seems to be a lack of documentation at this point, as well as clear directions regarding how to set up the flash drive. I’m getting some erratic random read speeds -when these are very low (>2000 KB/sec), it also seems to have generated a severely fragmented cache. My solution in that case was to reformat the drive and set it up again (is there any way to defragment in this situation?). Every time I do this I get a different read speed on the same device (SanDisk Cruser Micro -readyboost enhanced) Still don’t know which filesystem is best -the company recommends NTFS, but my personal tests were dismal with it -FAT32 seems to work better. They also recommend 1GB allocated space, but I think the ‘more is better’ idea makes better sense here?
I’m looking forward to your review-
Many thanks-

Hello Vion,
Agree about the documentation. I’m using a 2G Sandisk running at FAT32.

FYI - there is a new version [updated] on the site dated December 18th. I downloaded it a few minutes ago and will see if there is any improvement.

Thanks for your input.

Regards, Ron

iv now been testing eboostr, im using a AMD 3700+ laptop with 2gb of ram. iv got a 4gb flash drive dedicated to the swop file. the main problem i had with the machene is its got a slow hdd, since installing iv noticed some of the progrmas that caused the bigist slowdows (paintshop pro XI & Photoshop CS3 being the wrost) have sped up a fare amount. after looking through the files cashed within the cashfile (an option on the menu) it showed that it was now loading a lot of the small files from the flash drive. so far iv been impressed, but hope to see some improvments in the system such as removeing the cash for tempory internet files. from what iv read and tryed flash is great for fast access of little files but a hdd will beet it for constent access, so a compmise between the 2 as this seems to be offering is good. all this being said u need a large pen drive to take advantage of this system, its not a substute for system memory - id still recomend system memory over this but once your down to the hdd slowing you down and u have a slow hdd give this a try. and i’ll only recomend using large pendrives, as large as possable

Edd

Eagerly awaiting Ron’s final report. In the interim, I’m running 1.1 on a Centrino notebook (1.4Ghz single core) with 2GB RAM and have two 4GB and a 1GB cache setup. I”m noticing a serious slowdown in my boot times, with or without the drives connected and have written to the developers about setting the service to manual and disabling the CP from starting with windows. No response yet.. For now, anyone else having problems? Mine occur after the deskopt appears - explorer.exe (I assume) freaks out for a while because the taskbar and system tray do not respond to mouse input and there is a good 4-5 minute pause before the system tray starts to populate. This is NOT normal. Event viewer doesn’t report anything out of the ordinary.

Thanks,

Mike

iv had no problems with any slow downs - laptop has a slight snag that it wont boot with the drive atatched (but thats a bios problem) as soon as its says windows on the screen booting i can plug in and no problems. no 5 mins wait for the system to be able to use.

Thanks for that, eddweb. I think I’m just seeing a conflict somewhere… I’ll have to root around and find the culprit.

just out of intrest what antivirus are you using? maybe its something there thats causing a problem?

also try ccleaner for cleaning up the system a bit, may also help.
i had a simler problem for a while which was caused by the adobe updater, it just seemed to make the system hang for ages but if left it would then start working again - i got round it by removeing the updater and all went back to normal.

good luck in trying to track down the problem, its never fun when its slow to find the problem and the amount of reboots it can take.

Edd

eddweb,
Good point[s]. I’m using AVG free edition without any problems.

Agree about trying to locate problems like this. It is a PITA!

Thanks for the suggestions, eddweb. I’m running Webroot’s Anti-virus with Spysweeper, so will look at that. I actually came back here to ask if anyone’s seen an increase in explorer.exe crashes? My user account keeps randomly logging out, accompanied by explorer.exe crashes… This has happened two or three times in the past week (and never before) and I can’t help wondering if eBoostr has anything to do with it. Bizarrely eventviewer isn’t recording anything that might shed light on this. Time to run an online antivirus scan or two, I suppose!

Incidentally, there’s a new build of eBoostr available (dated Dec. 25 - #399): http://www.eboostr.com/download/

Hi Mike,
Thanks for the update.

i do know of Webroot’s Anti-virus (with spysweeper) as i used there spysweeper program (without antivirus) iv recently stoped using it as i found it used up a lot of resorces and slowed down the computer a fare bit. for a while i used sysmantec antivirs and have now moved on to nod32, as nod32 3.0 has spyware built into it i removed spysweeper and i found system speed genraly faster. as for explorer crashes it could cause be the cause as it is changing the file access system, as i get more information as i am playing with sevral systems i will post it back on here. do try changing antivirus as on all systems i use and maintain i find that the antivius system is what can slow down a system more than anything else.

Edd

Thanks eddweb. I DO have issues with Webroot hogging my CPU fairly often so I’ll try to followup on your suggestion.

Mike

So what’s the testing showing? Is eBoostr useful? Is it effective on machines with limited memory? Do you have anything new to report?

I’ve been checking this thread because I’ve got an older machine that’s got 512M of RDRAM. Yeah, I could upgrade this 5-year old machine with another 512M but it would cost a couple hundred (!) dollars because that’s what RDRAM costs - if you can find it. eBoostr looks like an interesting alternative, understanding that it doesn’t really operate like system RAM, because any relief on system memory useage would be helpful to me.

Thanks,
Terry

Hi Terry,

I wrote another article here:

http://www.lockergnome.com/blade/2007/12/26/ready-boost-for-xp-eboostr-reviewed/

Hope this helps, Ron

I’ve been testing eboostr on a celeron 533 with a intel 815 chipset with 512mb sdram (max the motherboard supports) the system has a raid 0+1 setup using 4 x 40gb 5400rpm drives and a PCI HPT370 card (this computer was used as a digital audio work station before i retired in 3 years ago) now if any of you have run raid 0+1 would know that its about the same speed as a single drive but with a higher seek which actually reduces ramdom seek performance, so any file under 32kb could take 2 - 3 times longer to load… anyway on with the test, formatted raid setup installed windows xp pro sp2, installed openoffice and opera then shutdown the computer and waited about a week for my Sonnet Allegro usb 2.0 pci card (this card is mac and linux compatible by the way) and finally my transcend Jetflash A2 4gb usb flash drive arrived. Now i did my testing in reverse tested eboostr first then without later (keep in mind this is the first time I’ve had this rig running xp) anyway i did my usual web surfing, downloaded alot of clipart and ebooks and browsed ebay and played with openoffice and demoscene demos which range in size usually 4kb to 64kb anyway after a week of doing that i removed the usb flash drive shut down the computer took a few days break then proceeded to test without the usb… now for the shocking part, clipart and text files felt like they took between 2 seconds to 3 seconds longer to load than before just searching for files in windows felt like you were browing a network drive on a 10mbit connection and thats on a fast computer… end of test put the old computer back in the garage and stuck the allegro usb pci card in my main computer which is a mac… might test it on that under virtualpc on the mac but have to get some serious work done…. conclusion? well it works damn well on a older system and thats pretty much all i can say but maybe useful if you run raid level 1 or 0+1 but i think raid 0 with some really fast drives would give the same result i had with the eboostr 0+1 setup with slower drives.

Hello jon b,
Thanks for sharing your experience with us. It is appreciated.
Regards, Ron

I can say I have just installed eboostr in trial mode on my home windows XP - that machine has until now been very lame, only about 500mb of RAM and I already had it connected to a 300gb Maxtor external drive. I was toying with the idea of wiping it clean and reinstalling window. However the eboostr has made a massive difference.

Booting up is also a lot quicker.

I am a user who is good with software but has never gone poking inside the hardware so I will probably shell out for this.

In all = recommended. And they did not pay me to write this!

Hi David B.,
Thanks for sharing your experience with us. It is appreciated.
Ron

Does any one has uninstalled the software and see if XP works fine after that?
I want to try the software on a centrino duo with 1gb of ram Windows XP media center and using visual studio 2005 debguging 2 solutions at the same time, I just bought 1gb more , but I want to be sure that my system will work fine if I decide to uninstall eBoostr.

Regards.

eboostr sped up my thinkpad a good amount. only has 256k ram and was so slow. now boots faster, goes into sleep mode faster, and loads commonly used programs faster. worth it in my opinion. i am going to try vista’s ready boost with a flash drive to see if there is any difference with big programs (cs3, etc)

Currently running Win XP Pro on an AMD 3800 with 1.5GB Ram, 160GB Hdd (SATA). Decided I’d test out this little app because I do quite a bit of Flash, Painter, GIMP, Photoshop work…Instead of mapping to a thumbdrive, I carved a 4GB Cache on my external 250GB USB drive. I’ve noticed a moderate boost in application boot time and again only moderate improvements while the app is running.

Speed check posts a 7+MB/s improvement in Disk access speed (ratio of 1.49).

What are you guys seeing on your end?

Hello. It run perfectly, after cured with medicine, with very good results and without any setback with the external device or file cache. But past 24 48hs it appears disabled, and I need to restart the O.S to reactivate. I tried to install ebooster from different sites and different external devices and the problem persists. I used the configuration and hardware indications recommended in this and other forums. in the about window says i have the full version. Might someone suggest the origin of the problem. I hope i don’t have to get rid of this sowtware.
Thanks

Quino

If you didn’t purchase the full version, than you are using the demo. It is limited to 4 hours use between reboots.

Thanks but I’m not using the demo.Full version apear in the the contol panel - help- about

Hi quino05,
If that is the case may I suggest you email technical support o see if they can provide a solution.
Regards, Ron

Hi everyone, after reading this article i decided to try this out. Just waiting for my 8gb stick to arrive (i intend to use it afterwards for what they were designed for; and before you say i know it can only utilise 4gb). From what i have heard it should be useful for me since i only have 512mb ram and i don’t have vista (so no built in SpeedBoost app for me). i am also wondering if it is really necessary to have this application, since relocating the swap file to the drive should do the same, should it not? it would be appreciated if someone was willing to test it doing this and compare speeds. tbh i can’t be arsed myself :p but i will let you know how my test goes.

to: MICHAEL PLANT. still have your boot problem after CCleaner??? (it’s free BTW). I’m not a PROFESSIONAL but just trying to help. I was think what else would make a change in that way, so my question is: Have you ckeck if the normal “pagefile swap” in Hard Disk “C” is still there?? it’s still bigger than 896mb?? when you open WinXP how much RAM and process are in USE?? is there any process using more than 80mb of RAM (I mean just when you start the computer not when you have open that program (related with that process))??? What kind of RAM do you have?? are equal modules? this happened when you upgrade from 1GB to 2GB of RAM??? Have you try run “Check disk” physical to see if there are a file corrupt (I have recently have a real serious problem with Lliveupdate from Symantec NIS 2008 with a corrupt file and make my Windows Vista OS get really mad (crazy at all), they couldn’t even open the internet browser and the System Guard said my antivirus database is out of update even it’s wasn’t)?? (sorry my english I’m from CHILE)

FOR EVERYBODY: doesn’t anyone have a problem installing the new eboostr beta 2.0.0.410????

If you want to download it from the official web page, just add “_beta”
to the file to download example: “http://download/setup.exe” change it to “http://download/setup_beta.exe

Regards
JC WILCOX
Latinamerican Psychologist of Computer
“even PC get crazy sometimes 8-)”

I’ve tested it on a mac running windows xp via vmware, works just as well as a real pc. Just some notes, I find 2gb Samsung SLC NAND based flash drives offer the best price to performace ratio, and some manufactures rate flash drives 60x 100x or 150x, if u mutiply that by 150 then divide by 1024 it will give you a rough idea how fast it mb/sec the drive is.

My brother tryed eboostr out on his computer (p4 2.4ghz with 1gb of ddr ram) and reports that it mades a noticible difference on MMORPG type games and RTS style games (less ingame pauses and shorter load times) but thinks the price for eboostr should be $10 less and i agree with him on that, but the 4hours trial period is plenty for him as its unhealthy to be in front of the computer for long periods at a time

Hi JCWilcox,

Thank you for your comments. All is well on my system (I moved to the beta for v.2 a couple of months ago). I solved my problem by streamlining what starts on my system at system start. The only remaining issue for me is that v.2 rebuilds the cache written to the USB drive fairly often and it’s a cpu and RAM intesnive operation.

Overall, I am very pleased.

NB v.2 allows you to create a cache up to the capacity of the drive (I just plugged in an external harddrive to confirm this and was offered the option of creating a 270GB cache!) alhtough the programme suggests that tthe cache be limited in size to 1 or 2 GB. V.2 will also allow you to utilize system memory (RAM) and to build a cache on it…

Hello again. -just wanted to report that I had some weird trouble with the new version 2 of e-boostr. (I’ve been using it on a secondary standard IDE hard drive partition formatted in NTFS with 4 kb clusters, where I also keep my pagefile, rather than on a flash drive.) V2 made windows unstable -it kept freezing up badly and showing several strange symptoms (unreadable fonts in control panel apps, continuous explorer crashes and windows errors.) These problems were only present when e-boostr was active. I have reinstalled V 1.1 which works fine.
Has anyone seen anything similar?

I have been using the demo version of eboostr since yesterday (5th May) on my XP Home SP2, 512MB (max), 60GB HD PC and found the following:-

1) To set up a (Fat 32 formatted) 4GB Pen Drive took about 3.5 hours.

2) After rebooting, my boot up time, which used to take 30 minutes, because of all my safety utilities and apps (especially Prevx), now takes only 5 minutes.

3) Apps like Word, Excel, Opera Browser, Windows Explorer, etc. open faster, especially after opening them for the first time.

To conclude, if you are a Vista user, a games player and/or can put more memory in your PC then this is not for you. However, if you an XP PC that has 1GB or less of RAM memory and can’t hold anymore, and/or your (serious) applications are starting to slow down then this eboostr utility can make a difference.

Hello ukbobboy,
Thanks for sharing your experience with us.

By the way. I’m getting 12MB/s random read speed on the Lexar 1GB stick.

I just set up eboostr 2.0.1 and it works very nicely. I’ve got a sony vaio 3.4ghz p4 with 2gb ram (desktop), and this program with a 2gb kingston jumpdrive (FAT32) has made a difference in operating speed. It took about 5-10 minutes to setup the program, and its working beyond expectations.

I am getting 15,500kb/sec read speeds and a 55% cache fill. Not sure what that means… perhaps a fast read speed and I’m under utilizing the jumpdrive?

I’ve tried it with XP SP3 and had to uninstall it since it broke all applications with a “failed to initialize” message, even explorer.exe. Ended up having to re-build the machine, which is unfortunante since I was really hoping I could use this to speed my Fujitsu U810

Rene,
Did you contact support? The folks at eBoostr are interested in hear about problems that occur.

Hi, trying Eboostr on 2GB, 1.86 ghz Acer Ferrari 3000 (2004) Win XP home, together w. 8 GB USB (the machine told me I could only cache 4 GB, in spite of having NTFS…?):
+ Yes, it halves the time to open Photoshop and most other apps.
- It does not seem to work until the second time you start an app after a restart…
- It does not seem to work at all at restart after hibernation. Then, Eboostr says it has no other drive, even if the USB is visible to the computer.
In case anybody has clues as to what to do against this, what settings I have misunderstood, please let me know please.
Best,
Erik
Stockholm, Sweden

i run wintendo 8-bit and have no ram. i also have sega mega drive with intel chipset and on that mac os x.

it is so slow and while running win xp in 256 bit color i want to try eBoostr, but problem is i have no usb-port on my sega mega.

i therefor installed tape-to-usb device.

my system now works very good! i can start it up in less than 15 minutes! eBoostr is a very good program! buy it! I did!

—
Come on guys.. stop posting stuff about your 10 year old Celeron-system with 256 MB ram, like you really are going to buy software to it for $30?!

Also, stop posting stuff like: “I know have decided to install the program”…

Next post: I know have installed the software, maybe I will try it too.

Last post: I installed the software, but decided to write my test result on another page.

Oh my Darwin, those Bloggs, hate em…
Usenet for the win.

/Mr. Burne