Move your Google Chrome Cache to the RAMdisk
After you got yourself a nice new RAMdisk and move a lot of things to it you may have experienced a few problems with moving certain directories.
On my EeePC 901 I use a version of Google’s browser Chrome. It is called Iron by SRWare and has a few additions that I found very valuable. First of all it is somewhat “de-googlified” (see details at their site) and second it uses a adblock.ini to … well … block ads. Furthermore I use the portable version because it is the pretty simple to backup because everything is in one single directory, even the profile(s).
Chrome (and Iron) has no option to move or disable the cache which is located at something like C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Default\Cache (on Windows XP) . So, how do you get it on your RAMdisk? Pretty easy:
XP with NTFS supports so called junction points. The only problem is that XP doesn’t support them very well. If they are there it knows how to handle them but you can’t create or remove them easily. There are a few programs that can do that for you like Hard Link Shell Extension (which I would recommend if you use hard links and junction points quite often) and Junction Link Magic (which I use as an occassional user). Both programs have very good and detailled how-tos on their sites so I won’t go into details on how to create a junction point.
Now cut-and-copy (the origial directory has to be empty!) the content of your Chrome cache to your RAMdisk (I use a subdirectory called “R:\cache”) and create a junction point which links the original cache directory to your new one and you are done. Wow, that was hard … Now Chrome and even XP think they write to the old directory but the files are on the RAMdisk now.
Btw: if you’ve created additional profiles you have to move the cache for every single one of them.
