A RAMdisk for everyone
A RAMdisk is a pretty good tool, especially if you use a computer with a SSD (Solid State Disk) like I do in my EeePC 901 (12Gb version). There are a lot of RAMdisks out there but most of them are not free. I recently found a really good RAMdisk software that costs nothing and has enough settings for my wishes. You can download it here – there is also a description how to use it.
But in short: unpack the downloaded zip, fire up the ramdisk.exe and click “Istall Ramdisk”. After that enter your settings. I use 384 Mb for the RAMdisk on my eee pc 901 with 2Gb RAM. Choose a drive letter (I kept the R:) and set the Media Type to “Fixed Media”. Finally click “Apply” or “OK”. Now you are done – you can see the result in “My Computer” as there is now a new drive “R:” (or whatever letter you asigned to it).
Now on to the fun stuff: right-click on “My computer”, then select Properties->Advanced->Environment variables. Then look for all the TEMP and/or TMP entries and change the according path to R:\Temp or any other directory on your RAMdisk. You wouldn’t even need to specify a diretory but I think it keeps everything a little bit more tidy.
You can also move your Temporary Internet Files, your Firefox Cache or any other browsers temp files there. These files are used a lot so the wear off your SSD faster. But be aware: not using a browser cache slows down your browsing (a bit) because frequently used sites are no longer cached. I have a quite fast connection most of the time so I don’t care about downloading a few bytes more or less – I switched to a cache on the RAMdisk and didn’t regret it.
