LOTRO Flashboost

[katarnus]

Hey guys, heard about this today and thought it was nifty so I'm trying it out. Especially since I play on a laptop.

Anyway, give it a peek and see what you think.

lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/LOTRO_FlashBoost

[Hitorichan]

What they're doing here is what I advocate doing with a dual hard-drive setup. I describe it better in my response to Duri's hardware advice request but here's the short version.

1. Windows has a pagefile. It swaps bits of memory out from RAM to HD to optomize performance - only keep the bits of memory in physical RAM that you need to access frequently. Paging takes lots of read/writes to the HD, which means it can't be reading, say, game textures.

2. If you have a second drive with LotRO's game content on it (or just installed on a second drive) you can be reading texture data even while the system is paging data. That's why I have two physical hard drivesin my machine... with Windows on one and my high-disk-utilization applications on the other.

So, if you've got Vista and a single hard drive, check out FlashBoost. It really should help. Especially if your hard drive is slow (which notebook drives are... slower means less power required, after all.)