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If you decide you need more RAM and don't have the money for Win 7 X64 (which really is a kick ass OS BTW) you might want to look into SuperSpeed RAMDisk as with PAE it will let you use the RAM XP can't see as a RAMDisk which will really give a machine a kick in the pants.

I have a couple of customers still on XP as well as keeping an XP partition myself for some old software that doesn't like Win 7 (Cubase) and having 4.5Gb of RAM as a temp drive really speeds things up. It is butt simple to use, you can set it to save between sessions, its a really nice piece of software although in the end if you are planning on keeping that box awhile Win 7 really is the way to go, the support for NCQ and SuperFetch make Win 7 a better bet IMHO.

As for TFA personally I'm waiting for Nvidia to get bought by Intel. After the DOJ didn't say squat when it came to Intel rigging compilers or bribing OEMs I figured anything and everything goes and Intel IGPs still suck. Nvidia selling SLI to their former rivals at this point seems logical to me as Intel as been openly hostile to Nvidia for quite some time. Just look at how they wiped out the Nvidia chipset business by refusing to allow them on any socket past LGA775.

A couple of questions though: does Nvidia still disable PhysX if they detect a Radeon GPU? Because if they do this is gonna be kinda pointless as pretty much all AMD boards have Radeon IGPs now. And does anyone know if the Aegia PhysX boards are worth playing with? I've noticed them going for like $35 online and for those of us without Crossfire and running Radeon GPUs it might nice if it lets us run PhysX.

Hybrid sleep is kinda like the way Macs do it in that it writes the RAM to HDD but unlike the Mac which only writes to the HDD if the battery is getting low (IIRC) the hybrid sleep on Win 7 dumps the contents of RAM to a file like hibernate while keeping just the used pages alive in RAM while powering everything else down.

What this does is it gives you the instant on of sleep while making power failures a non issue because you can literally yank the cord or pull the battery and it STILL gives you an advantage over a cold boot by only having to reload the previous state. When you combine this with Readyboost and Superfetch it makes cold boots pointless and it will intelligently decide which to do based on your situation. Like if you are out and on battery it will most likely simply hibernate, if you are plugged in it will go to sleep, pull the plug and it is back to hibernate, all with no user intervention.

So you really ought to give it a try, as the new memory management is frankly top notch. And this is coming from someone that HATED the fisher price UI of XP and the way it would waste RAM by leaving it free while hitting swap and thought Vista sucked the big wet titty. In fact I advise users if they are still on XP to buy a RAMDrive program which lets you map Swap to RAM thus keeping XP from wasting it by leaving huge swaths idle for no good reason.

Nice side effect is that the one I recommend allows you to beat the 3.2GB XP 32bit barrier by using PAE to map swap to the unused memory, thus letting you have more than 4Gb of RAM in XP. It is nice for those that need to dual boot for some ancient legacy app that don't play nice with modern OSes. I use it myself to keep my old copy of Cubase which doesn't like X64. If you would like to check it out the link is here and they have a free trial to let you see if it works for you.

That said the new stuff in Win 7 frankly rocks and the memory management is just the tip of the iceberg. of course i wouldn't be surprised if MSFT cocks it up for Windows 8, heaven forbid they put out two good OSes in a row, hell the world would probably spin backwards.

I say that, because I have "held off" for years now, waiting for them to get to THIS stage of performance (especially on writes, where they're now, FINALLY, 'dusting' std. mechanical HDD's... even my WD Velociraptors, iirc!)...

Fact is, this one (or the one AFTER it, which I am guessing WILL be based on 6gb/sec. tech), will probably be what I purchase. I took a look over at STORAGEREVIEW.COM & only the OCZ Vertex seems to 'best it' along with the Intel 510 model in fact (however, I only cursorily skimmed, there may be faster ones for all I know (I don't pay that much attention to hardware nowadays & for years now really... only when something REALLY NICE comes along!)

I've truly been a "BIG FAN" of SSD tech & before that, software based ramdisks... & it really doesn't take a genius to know if you speed up the slowest/worst part of ANYTHING, you "gain a 1,000-fold", but there you are...

See... when I wrote stuff up about it for SuperSpeed.com back in 1996:

http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/faq.php#R001

(Formerly EEC Systems, which did really well software-wise improving their stuff by up to 40% + at MS-TechEd 2000-2002 in SQLServer Performance Enhancement, as well as how to use them 'creatively')

OR

For CENATEK (now known as DataRAM) as to the same benefits I extolled for SuperSpeed's SuperDisk/SuperCache programs, albeit this time in hardware for DataRam/CENATEK?

It all worked... but? LOL, I was "shooting from the hip", to be honest about it!

(I didn't express that well! (I.E.-> I was really taking chances/risks really, based on theory alone & common-sense really) when I bought into that tech, both in software &/or hardware)

I say that because it was EXPENSIVE! Especially for the CENATEK stuff (my IRAM isn't anywhere NEAR that cost & how I use it is in the list below), but "the #'s were there" & so was the theory... as well as "common-sense".

Still - After tests?

Well - it merely proved true when I did the tests/analysis & benchmarks, + tests w/ webservers &/or DB engines, as well as stuff "normal folks/users" could use them for also.

Using SSD tech IS the 'future' even now (albeit I was saying that 15++ yrs. ago, and doing it too, but the buy in was HUGE, as well as a risk on product immaturity).

For the past few years now though, industry uses it like mad (when performance is "everything" or, rather, counts a LOT)... like in webservers, or database engine work!

However/Again? Normal "end user folks" can use it too, to much gain... & not just on benchmarks.

Yes - You can IMMEDIATELY see/feel the diff. when you do things like this below with SSD's:

1.) Place your pagefile.sys (WinNT based OS) or swap partitions onto it (Linux for example)

2.) Place your %temp% ops onto it

3.) Place your print spooler location onto it

4.) Place your webbrowser caches onto it

5.) Place your %comspec% onto it

6.) Run programs from them

& more...

LASTLY, on NON-FLASH based SSD tech though, such as the Gigabyte IRAM &/or CENATEK RocketDrive I use:

What makes ME wonder, is that nowadays, we have 64-bit technology in software...which means the 4gb limit of my two NON-FLASH Ram based SSD's can be upped HUGELY from that 32-bit memory addressing limitation IN THE DRIVERS!

I am truly suprised no "super-huge" non-FLASH ram based Ramdisks/Ramdrives aren't being made & released... because 64-bit drivers can address many orders of magnitude more memory than do 32-bit ones, which was the "stumbling block" for them being larger (even though you can "span" 4x4gb of them into a 16gb unit? That's PUNY by comparison to the 600gb size of THIS one in the article here today).

They would have 1 gain over these FLASH units though I imagine:

LONGEVITY (yes, I am taking another "risk about disk" here, but there you are!)..

Well there are a couple of other choices, at least if you are on Windows. One you can use a third party tool like CCleaner (which I prefer this link as it is a fully automated install that doesn't ask to install Chrome and will install CCleaner to the right click of the recycle bin) that has a nice little checkbox for cleaning out Flash crap, or Two if you don't mind spending some money for some cool extras you can pick up SuperSpeed RAMDisk and set your temp folders to a RAMDisk which will be wiped on reboot. This also gives you the advantage of having much faster RAM for temp and if you have more than 4GB on Windows x86 it will even let you use the RAM above the 4GB limit for a RAMDisk. Nice for those of us that dual boot with Windows XP for older apps.

So while I agree that the evercookie asshattery needs to DIAF, it isn't like there aren't easy ways around it.

Are you using a UPS? I've had customers with the same "bad luck" and putting them on a UPS cleared it right up. You'd be surprised how many spikes and sags you get in some areas. As for a motherboard I've never had much luck with Asus, they're often expensive, but don't seem to last, at least for me, any better than a cheapy. If you aren't gonna go SLI/Crossfire I'd look at a Gigabyte or ECS business class motherboard. I've built quite a few with ECS business class (I'm typing this on one now, as I liked the board enough to use it on my own PC) and they use top notch parts like solid caps and sturdier connectors.

Here is the board I've been using lately, it comes with support for XP 32/64 - Windows 7 32/64 and it runs like a champ with the 95w Phenom II and 8Gb of RAM. Finally about your apps? You can either dual boot or use XP Mode with Windows 7 Pro, although you'd be surprised how many older apps will work even with Windows 7 X64. Out of all my apps I have found exactly two I can't run on 7 X64 (my older version of Cubase and a DVD authoring app) so I just reboot into XP when I need those apps. If you are gonna stay with XP 32 you might want to look into Superspeed RAMDisk Plus as it'll let you take advantage of over 4Gb of RAM using PAE by allowing you to convert the unused RAM into a RAMDisk. Really gives XP a kick in the pants to have paging running from RAM.

RamDisk Plus 10 has a most unique feature. Our patent pending technology can access memory beyond the limitation imposed by a Windows 32-bit operating system! In other words, RamDisk Plus 10 can use "unmanaged" Windows' memory e.g. above 4GB. It can also use the stubbornly inaccessable memory between 3.2GB and 4GB. See the product's help file for detailed explanation of what "unmanaged" memory is and how to access and use it with RamDisk Plus 10.

Do they have to patch kernels to do this ... ? [see http://www.superspeed.com/servers/ramdisk.php%5D

Though it's not free, this will give you a ram drive on windows xp for all those with more than 3.25gb of ram. I use it for my page file and for the web browser cache.

"Given that the core components of an OS are only a few GB, even 8GB systems might be able to do this, today." - by 2nd Post! (213333) on Thursday March 20, @03:38PM (#22810564) Homepage They can, on Windows NT-based systems, since NT 3.51 iirc, in fact... done via SuperDisk &/or SuperVolume, by SuperSpeed.com (formerly EEC Systems):

http://www.superspeed.com/servers/supervolume.php

I wrote up an article for that companies' website whose ideas took them to a finalist position @ Microsoft Tech-Ed 2000-2002 iirc, in one of the harder (if NOT the hardest to win) ones to be in, SQLServer Performance Enhancement.

APK

P.S.=> That was while I was being paid to create their SuperCache/SuperCache II tuner code, which started out as a free addon to it, & then I sold they the code which made it up to 40% more efficient (because it reminded me of tuning DOS' SmartDrive, lol, & had parameterization possiblities for the driver init. stage)...

Anyhow, the article I wrote (for they, AND later, CENATEK, about their RocketDrive SSD) was a good side thing to "turn them on to" (back in 1996 in Windows NT-Pro Magazine no less to a GREAT review by Mr. John Enck, technical editor then & now (since they are Windows.NET magazine OR WindowsIT Pro mag now, not sure anymore)...

& it worked - for DATABASING people, & other things galore (serving up websites, etc. & just general HUGE reductions in latency, in almost anything you can imagine to apply them to, really)... apk