gHacks technology news » speed up software http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:24:03 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Use a Ramdisk to speed up Applications http://www.ghacks.net/2007/04/18/use-a-ramdisk-to-speed-up-applications/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/04/18/use-a-ramdisk-to-speed-up-applications/#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2007 17:24:50 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/04/18/use-a-ramdisk-to-speed-up-applications/ Many modern computers have one, two or even more gigabytes of ram that can be put to good use by creating a Ramdisk that is a virtual drive that uses part of the computers ram. The Ramdisk can be used like every other hard drive, you can copy applications and files to it and start them from there if they allow that. It is for instance possible to move portable applications like Firefox, Thunderbird or Audacity into the Ramdisk and use the advantage that those applications are actually residing in memory which speeds up loading times a lot.

One convenient way to setup a Ramdisk is to use the software AR Ramdisk which is easy to setup and work with. Just install AR Ramdisk as usual and start configuring the settings afterwards. Assign a drive letter to the Ramdisk and choose a size for it. I would not suggest to select more than a quarter of your Ram but you can experiment with the settings if you like. Leave everything as is and restart your computer afterwards. You should see a new drive letter after the restart, now copy files or applications to the Ramdisk and start them from there.

You will see a noticeable speed increase when running applications from the Ramdisk. A good website to get some portable applications is the portable apps website which has downloads for programs like Firefox, Thunderbird and many others.

It is also possible to use the Ramdisk for the temp files of Windows. To do that you need to move the Temp directory from the default location to the Ramdisk. To change the default location go to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Environment Variables and change the Windows temp dir to the Ramdisk.

It should be noted that all data that is in the Ramdisk will be lost if you restart the computer. Remember that the files reside in system Ram. This is great for temp files which means that you do not have to delete the temp files by yourself. It could also be used to set the disk cache of Firefox to the Ramdisk which would mean that it would be automatically cleared during shutdown.

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