I recently purchased a HP Mini 1000.  It’s pretty cool great battery life, clear screen and a fancy SSD drive.   Granted only 16GB it’s quiet, easy on the battery and lighter.  But I noticed that web browsing would cause a LOT of slowdown and churning with the hard drive light. Read More Below...

It appears that the SSD drive in my HP Mini was a bit slow for browsing.   I had forgotten how much a drive is used in a web browser for cache and temporary files with a web browser.  So my slow down wasn’t my WiFi connection, processor or memory but the drive itself.  I then did some research and found an old solution for this problem.  Years ago the idea of a RAM drive was used to create a virtual drive in memory to increase speed and avoid floppy disk swapping in systems with no hard drives.  With the increase in hard drive sizes and lower cost RAM drives were removed from the limelight.  Who needed a 250MB virtual drive when you had a 250GB hard drive?

However with the Mini the drive speed was so slow that loading a couple tabs in any browser (IE, FireFox and Chrome) would bring the system to a halt.

So I created a RAM drive using software I found here.  It was a simple install and I created a 250MB hard drive or 1/4 my total RAM.  It would seem like a lot but since I’m only running simple apps the loss in RAM was nothing compared to the performance gain.  I moved the cache locations in IE and Firefox to the RAM drive and noticed a HUGE performance gain.  Chrome was a bit more difficult as Google hasn’t included the ability to move just the cache to a different folder.  You can start Chrome with –user-data-dir= to set the profile to the RAM drive.  Once this is done performance is increased tenfold.

I also updated XP to run it’s temp file from the RAM drive by setting the TEMP and TMP environment variables.

Overall my system is running snappier especially the browsers.   My next step is to increase my RAM to balance out my loss.