"Tae Song" wrote in message
...

"Bill in Co." wrote in message
...
Tae Song wrote:
I thought I would share this with you all, a few little tricks to boost
Windows performance.

If you have a spare USB flash drive or you are willing to get a cheap
say
1GB flash drive.

First we plug in the flash drive.

Go to Disk Manager and assign it a drive letter, like Z: (this is just
to
get it out of the way and optional)

Go to Advanced system settings, Evironment variables.

Change the Temp variable under User to Z:\ (I didn't see any point
creating
folders, but that's optional)

Change the Temp variable under System variable to Z:\

This will cut down on I/O traffic to the hard drive. Starting an app
like
Word, would cause the HD to read the program into memory while at the
same
time writing into the drive, temporary files. This causes an I/O queue
to
form and degrade Windows performance. By off loading some of the I/O
traffic to another storage device, the hard drive read/write head
doesn't
have to move around as much either. All performance gains.

I don't think so!! There will be a performance LOSS, in large part due
to the much longer write times to a flash drive. Also, it's generally a
poor idea to have so many continuous writes to a flash drive, as flash
drives have a more limited number of write cycles.

snip rest of this post


You don't need an extremely high write speed. A lot of times temp files
are just empty files, many are 0 bytes. Almost all are under 700KB. Even
at a write speed of of say a low of 5MB/s is still only a fraction of a
sec.

This keeps the read/write head from thrashing about creating and updating
file records.

And just to up the ante, I enabled disk compression on the USB drives to
reduce the size of the writes.

Reducing the size of the writes won't affect the time it takes and certainly
will not alter the fact that Flash technology has a limited number of write
cycles. If you're using it as a temp drive, you are ensuring that a flash
drive will fail *sooner* rather than later.

Flash drives aren't appropriate for filesystem utility use. They can only
be relied on for convenient transfer of data that exists elsewhere.