How to Make Your PC 50 Times Faster with RamDisk Plus

With RamDisk Plus, random reads and writes can be performed 50 times faster than your hard drive allows.

Last week we announced the addition of RamDisk Plus to our PC performance lineup. Some customers gave glowing reviews of the product:

“…RamDisk Plus sped everything up, from the display of web pages to the loading of Microsoft Word.  It seemed to breathe a new life into it.  I did run 2 or 3 days of the trial before I decided it would help me out, and it did, a lot. Thank you,”

-Al L.

“I liked your product so much after only a couple of days trial I purchased RamDisk Plus. Installation is easy and the biggest help was the email you sent explaining how to cache the web browser pages and the windows temporary storage. Without this help I would have spend lots of frustrating time trying to find the correct place to make these adjustments. It does make a dynamitic improvement in web page loading. I know your product creates storage in memory that looks like disk drives to the system, very nice.”

- Douglas B.

“I downloaded the free trial first. I showed it to my son, who is going to the University of Kansas for IT and who has a part-time job in IT. He was very favorably impressed with what he saw in the trial edition and he is not easily impressed….My experience with RamDisk Plus is still rather limited but one very immediate and noticeable effect is the increase in the browser speed.  After installing it, my son looked at me and said “I doubt you’ll ever have to wait for anything to download again.”

-Mike S.

Some people had a little trouble putting RamDisk Plus to use. So we’d like to share some tips on how to use RamDisk Plus.

Here are instructions on how to configure RamDisk Plus to speed up everything on your PC!

First, create a RAM disk using this getting started guide. Then follow the instructions below:

HOW DO I SPEED UP WEB BROWSING?

Point your browser cache to RamDisk Plus. Not only does this speed up web browsing, it also increases the security of your Internet history. Because it is located on the RAM disk, your browser cache is automatically cleared at shutdown.

Follow the instructions for your web browser (after adding a RAM disk using RamDisk Plus).

HOW DO I SPEED UP PRINTING?

Move the print spool folder to RamDisk Plus.

If you’ve set up a Windows XP system to act as a print server on your network, you can improve the print server’s responsiveness. All you need to do is move the print spool folder from its default location to RamDisk Plus. The performance gain comes from separating the management of the potentially huge spool file from the same drive on which the Windows system files exist.

To move the print spool folder to RamDisk Plus:

• Create a RAM disk of sufficient size to hold the spool files.
• Go to Start -> Printers and Faxes. (Or, in classic view: Start -> Settings -> Printers and Faxes).
• From the top menu select FileServer Properties.
• Select the Advanced tab. Enter the RAM disk’s drive letter (e.g. S:) in the Spool Folder text box, and click OK.
• In the warning message dialog box, click Yes.

HOW DO I SPEED UP WINDOWS PERFORMANCE?

Point where temporary files are stored to RamDisk Plus.

To change the location of the System Temp folder, follow the steps given below:

• Right click on Computer
• Click on Properties (or System Properties)
• Click on Advanced system settings
• Click on the Advanced tab
• Click on the button near the bottom labeled Environment Variables
• You may see both TMP and TEMP listed in the section labeled User variables for (account). That’s the common location; each different login account is assigned its own temporary location. In the Variable value Edit box you may specify the path to the directory that Windows and many other programs will use for temporary files.

Be sure and repeat that process for both TMP and TEMP.

You’ll need to restart any running programs for the new value to take effect. In fact, you’ll need to restart Windows for it to begin using the new value for its own temporary files.

HOW DO I PUT A PAGEFILE ON THE RAM DISK?

• Right-click on My Computer and click on Properties.
• Click on the Advanced tab.
• Click the Settings button in the Performance box.
• Click on the Advanced tab in the Performance Options dialog window.
• Click the Change button in the Virtual Memory box.
• In the Virtual Memory dialog window
  • Select RAM disk drive
  • Select the Custom size: radio button
  • Set initial size and maximum size to be just a little smaller than the size of the RAM disk. Tip: Immediately above Custom size: is Space available: which is the size of the RAM disk.
  • Select the drive that currently has the paging file.
  • Select the No paging file radio button.
• Click OK.
• Restart the computer for the new settings to take effect.

HOW DO I REDUCE WRITES ON SOLID STATE DRIVES?

If your computer only uses a solid state drive (SSD), use RamDisk Plus as a cache to store data – including:

• The pagefile
• Temporary Internet files (located in your web browser cache)
• Temporary files

Follow the instructions above for the three types of data listed here.

HOW DO I TURN A FOLDER ON THE RAM DISK INTO A NETWORK SHARE?

• Right-click on the disk or folder you wish to share, and select Sharing and Security.
• Select Share this folder or, if already shared, click on New Share.
• Enter the new Share name and a Comment.
• Set User limit, Permissions, and Caching as required.
• Click OK to create the share and close the property page.

HOW DO I MOUNT THE RAM DISK AT A MOUNT POINT?

RamDisk Plus supports mount points. However, it is not configurable in Disk Management. Instead you must use the command-line interface mountvol.

Open a command-prompt window and enter mountvol. Suppose it lists RamDisk Plus with drive letter R: as follows:

To mount RamDisk Plus R: at c:mountpointsramdisk enter:
mountvol c:mountpointsramdisk \?Volume{8c4f2cc4-20d71-11ed8-80c9-806d6172696f}

Placing a file in the root of R: and placing the file in c:mountpointsramdisk will now accomplish the same thing, as both paths point to the same object.

To remove the above mount enter:
mountvol c:mountpointsramdisk /D