Ready boost

I would like to get a card to use ready boost on my computer.

Please dont say that it does not work, I am not trying to make it faster but to reduce HD spinning.

I have a SD/MMC-MS/Pro slot on my Dell 1420 (SDHC does not work nor do my usb flash drives)

So what would work for ready boost in that slot?

 

I would go with a a usb flash drive you can grab readyboost flash drives from crucial.com for pretty cheap

 

I dont want to go usb because I am afraid I am going to break it off

 

clutch, USB is only 4 wires. If you have the guts to take your notebook apart you can solder 4 wires, one wire per port on a USB hub, and run them to a female port which you can mount inside your laptop. Than you can simply leave a USB card inside your laptop as a ready boost drive.
If space is tighter, you can do the same, however disasemble the memory card from teh casing. The actual PCB inside the memory card is very small. Just remove the usb head, and solder wires directly to the card. The unit should take up about an area of 50mm x 20mm x about 5mm thick. Its very small and you can throw say a 32gb card inside and you will have an awesome setup.

If you dont want to do that I guess the best you can do is a flash card compatible with your system, like memory stick duo's or SD or whatever your system uses.

K-TRON

 

I am surprised that those SD card did not work. Here is a list of requirements but I do not see a mention of USB only. Hmm...

http://blog.kazmarek.com/2008/7/30/vista-readyboost-flash-drive-requirements/

Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost

 

Why not just get a SSD? Also for readyboost to work it needs to be above a certine speed.

 

Well it is the speed I am worried about, I would like to get a SD card (or what ever will fit in my slot) but I want to know they will work.

Would this work?

http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Memor...6?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1237573677&sr=8-6

 

It's funny you mention that. CPU Magazine ran a How-To article last year on how to do exactly that. Clutch, check out CPU Magazine's July 2008 issue, specifically pages 43-45, or click the following link for a short excerpt of the article:

Eee PC Storage Mod: Add More Gigabytes In A Flash

It's not the full article, as you'll need to be a subscriber in order to read it all, but I'm sure doing a quick Google search will net you the same results. Good luck! =)

 

I only knew to do it because I had an old laptop inspiron 3800 and I wanted a larger harddrive, so I got a PCMCIA to USB 2.0 card, ripped it apart to make it fit inside the pcmcia port and not be external. Than I ran 4 wires up to through the lid, and attached two 32gb flash cards to it. It runs relatively fast for a ~10yr old machine

Honestly since your laptop already has a USB2 port it should take no longer than an hour to do once you get our system open. Its literally 8 solder points and 4 wires

K-TRON

 

I hate to be the "voice of reason" here but with 3Gb of ram (in your sig) adding any kind of readyboost will not help. Readyboost was designed to supplement systems with insufficient ram and as you add more than 1+Gb of ram the readyboost advantages quickly vanishes to nothing.
If you want to stop harddrive spinning under vista just turn off superfetch, it is what causes 95% of hard drive thrashing trying to predicatively cache files into memory.

You should keep the readyboost service turned on however because it enables readyboot which will help with windows boot and shutdown time but superfetch IMO is not needed. Try turning off superfetch and see if the hard drive "spinning" stops. If that fails buy more ram(ram is cheap right now) as ram is going to be way faster than any device running on a usb bus.