Can you add a 1gb intel turbo memory mini card to a Vostro 1500?

Noticed theres an extra Mini card slot in the Vosto... well 3 slots one for wifi, one for cellular and one for WPAN (bluetooth) which is already added by a separate board so its kinda free.

So... can you put anything in this slot? like an Intel turbo cache card? Has anyone done this? The parts only like $28 so even a marginal performance gain... it might be worth it.

 

Yes you can. But you will likely get worse performance if you use it.

 

what is that for?

 

I was wondering about that... not sure how fast the flash memory would be for caching but I have the 160gb SATAII drive in it now... which is pretty fast.

 

Its a Vista thing... vista will use turbo cache (flash memory) to cache frequently used bits for faster access. Vista can also use usb drives in that capacity but I think the USB max speed limits its usefulness. Not sure if the Intel turbo flash mini card is faster or not.

 

It was benchmarked. It said if you had 1gb or less then it improves speed. If you have 2gb or more it wont.

If you have 2gb ram, spend that 30 bucks and get a 2gb ram stick and replace a 1gb with it == 3gb ram. It will be much more of a boost than the intel card.

 

Cool. Good to know. I put 4gb in it so im good to go. Only 3.5 visible due to 32bit OS but I can live with that till the 64bit driver world gets more seasoned.

 

ok thx alchemist!

 

64-bit driver world is already surprisingly well-seasoned at this point.

The only functionality I am missing in X64 is 16-bit support (rarely used, and even that can be partially circumvented with DosBox freeware) and firefox support for the fingerprint reader.

I have printed to various makes and models of printers, all of which have had x64 drivers.

 

Hmm.. i'm interested in turbo memory too, but my XPS M1210 have only a single slot (for EVDO card), can it be used for a Turbo memory card ?

 

Cool... have you noticed any performance or stability improvments in 64bit vista vs 32? How about game performance? Vista is still not up to XP standards in that department from what ive seen.

 

I turn off all the pretty effects and all that, and tweak it so that only the services I need are running. I also have 4 GB installed as that's really the minimum needed for x64.

Vista X64 definitely the most stable OS I've ever owned, including XP. I have yet to see a BSOD in x64. This, despite multiple monitors, resuming from standby without the USB and monitor attached, visa versa, all that and more and the OS doesn't blink.

I do think that some things load faster in X64 than X86, though not by a whole lot. Though this is not a perfect example, I load about 10 tabs at once in Firefox when I first start it up. I notice that the X86 version of Firefox takes an extra half-second or so to load the tabs, whereas with the 64-bit version (Bon Echo), the tabs load instantly.

Drivers have to be signed in X64, so you're far better off in that regard than in the anything-goes of X86, since you can expect to get only quality drivers.

In general, I just like the idea of using a 64-bit wide data-bus vs. being limited to a 32-bit one, one the hardware is 64-bit capable. While it doesn't translate to quite double the speed, I think it's an idea whose time is finally arriving.