I read yesterday of a blogger's enthusiastic endorsement of SSDs -- solid state drives. He replaced his desktop computer's hard drive with a 128GB solid state drive he had purchased from Amazon. (The drive kit included the software needed to transfer the data image from the old to new drives, so no need to reinstall all his software.) He wrote excitedly about the improvement in speed.
This speed-up solution worked for him, because his old hard drive contained just 60GB of files, and because he has enough money laying around to pay the $250 for the new drive.
The solution does not work well for those with large amounts of data, such as the 500GB and 1TB drives in my desktop computer that are 3/4 full. Here the solution is to use a large and fast USB thumbdrive for ReadyBoost -- the Windows feature that made use of USB memory to speed up load times.
My desktop computer uses an 8GB USB drive from Imation. Through ReadyBoost, PaintShop Pro loads instantly, and AutoCAD 2011 opens up 5x faster. This speedup cost me just $35.
There is no problem finding a large USB drive; the problem lies in knowing which ones are fast.
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