hello,
I presently have 512mb. of RAM on my laptop and I have two 512mb. flashdrives. Is there a way I can use these flashdrives as additional RAM on my laptop? If so, how do I do this and would my laptop RAM size increase? I presently cannot afford to upgrade my laptop RAM as is, but have the flashdrives.

Hope I made sense,
Jesse

No, the two are completely different. Your flash drive is more like a Hard Drive if that helps you.

You can use the ReadyBoost feature of Vista to help speed up your computer (if the flash drives meet the ReadyBoost standard). Insert them and click on the ReadyBoost feature when the autoplay dialog comes up. From my reading, this has shown a significant degree of improvement in systems with 512 mB of RAM.

Usasma,
If I do the readyboost feature and I go to System Properties, would I see a larger amount of RAM listed? I had a friend look at this issue previously and all Vista said was that I had 512mb. of Ram. And I had two flashdrives in my laptop with the ReadyBoost feature activated! It never acknowledged my flashdrives.... so what's up?

Thanks again.

I apologize for my response, I was not aware of this feature in Vista...

For a device to be compatible and useful it must conform to the following requirements:

* The capacity of the removable media must be at least 256 MB (250 after formatting)
* Devices larger than 4 GB will have only 4 GB used for ReadyBoost
* The device should have an access time of 1ms or less
* The device must be capable of 2.5 MB/s read speeds for 4 KB random reads spread uniformly across the entire device and 1.75 MB/s write speeds for 512 KB random writes spread uniformly across the device
* The device must have at least 235 MB of free space
* NTFS and FAT32 are supported
* The initial release of ReadyBoost supports one device

No, it won't count as extra RAM - but it will speed up the system.

Darn... guess I'll need to save my $$ to buy more RAM then. Say, here's a question-

I have a 75GB hard-drive, but when Vista was on it, it used about 20% of space. If I decided to put music on my laptop, would that slow the thing down?

In general, no it wouldn't - but if there's a lot of fragmentation, then the more fragmented files you've got, the slower the system will be.

BTW - ReadyBoost is a good "stop gap" measure before buying more RAM. BTW - is it DDR or DDR2 RAM? Do you have any open slots?

The RAM card I have is a Sodimm PC2100 DDR Usasma. What do you mean by open slots?

I suppose he means empty slots PCI where RAM cards can fit on.

And how would I check if I had an empty PCI slot?

since laptops are a little tricky to open and look in, take it in to a shop and get a quote


from your signature

this thread is in the windows vista forum

also ram does not reside in a pci slot, they use dimm slots

Its in the Vista forum because I am thinking of upgrading to Vista.... I presently have Windows XP MCE.....

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4181.html

this program will generate reports that give clues to upgrading computers

Yep, laptops usually have 2 slots to populate with RAM. So, if you've got 2 - 256 mB chips installed, you'll have to pull one out to add more RAM. If you've only got 1 slot filled with a 512 mB chip, then you've got an open slot to put it in.