Turbo Charge your PC for Everyday Use by Using Free Ram Disk Software

In recent years hardware manufacturers have ramping up the processing power of computers processors for consumers while releasing the systems with OEM laggy slow mechanical hard disks. Consumers are forking out up to ￡1000 for the latest i7 system and after a few months being disheartened as they saw their beast become slow and laggy like their previous system. What the non-technical didn't realise the after the processor becomes a certain power the processor is not longer the bottleneck affecting the speed of the system it is the hard disk. A computer is only as fast as its slowest component. While the processor was busy allocating tasks and read/writing data to the mechanical hard disk; the program, OS, game or task you were doing is lagging due to the limited read and write speeds of the hard disk contained inside. What makes matters worse after time a hard disk's data becomes fragmented meaning the actuator arm, similar to a needle on a record player, has to work harder and move further on the platters in order to get to the data blocks destinations needed to make a read file. Defragmentation helps this as the data is placed sequentially so the arm doesn't have to move as far to read data from the blocks. Defragmentation helps but takes time. Mechanical disks don't match the speed of an SSD or the volatile storage the RAM (A computer's short-term memory).

Average Read Write Speeds of a Mechanical Hard Disk

The Age of SSD Drives

SSD or solid state drives offer a huge performance advantage over mechanical drives, The memory is stored on chips on the drive so there are no moving parts. Data can be accessed fast as there are no reading heads on the drives. SSD drives are expensive but are coming down in price and read-write speeds can reach up to 550mbs around 11 times faster than most mechanical drives.

Ram, What is It?

Ram is the random access memory of a computer and is used for processes that need faster recall. Memory from RAM is gone when a computer is powered off. Much of the RAM is not used and wasted. You can check how much RAM your system has by selecting the menu in Windows and right clicking 'Computer' and selecting properties from the drop down box. Ram has read and write speeds up to 1,701% percent faster than some SSD drives. Unfortunately, it would prove inconvenient to use this as everyday storage to high cost and volatility. Your electronic information would be gone when the system is switched off.

Temp Directory

Many read and writes occur in the windows TMP and TEMP directory. If these are located on a slow hard disk you PC will operate slowly. The constant read and writes wear your hard disk. By default, the folders are located on you PC's 'C' drive. You can check the location of your temp directory by going to the Start menu > Right Click on Computer > Select 'Properties' > Selecting Advanced System Settings > the Advanced Tab > Environmental Variables and the temp Directories are listed.

Creating a Virtual Ram Disk

Using Softperfect's free RAM Disk for Windows downloaded from here you could harness the full potential of your PC at no cost. Startup times will increase, along with program opening times and other improvements.

Steps to Creating a RAM Disk

1. Download the EXE from above and install with regular settings.
2. Allow the driver dialogue installation.
3. Start the program and select the + icon.
4. Select the size of your RAM disk I would go by 30% of your available RAM on your computer.
5. Select a drive letter.
6. Change the filesystem to NTFS.
7. In the create folders option, create a folder called TMP and one called TEMP.
8. Hit 'OK'.
9. Now the new RAM disk will appear as a physical disk in Windows like you just plugged in a hard disk.
10. Navigate to tools and select 'set Windows Temp Folder'.
11. Change your path to the TEMP directories you just made could be A:\TEMP and A:\TMP for example. It is what letter you selected in step 5.
12. Hit OK.

Well done. Now you should see some system performance improvements. Use Google to find out how to move manually certain programs temp folder paths that may not use default Windows Temp directories or by checking most software settings in the options menu.

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