Intel Robson / Turbo Memory

Gilga

Gilga

New Member
I got a new laptop several months back, and there was the option to pay some relatively small amount (maybe $100) to get 4GB of Intel Turbo Memory. So I read up on it, seemed like it would either speed up my games or speed up bootup so I gave it a try.

As far as I can tell, I would have been better off using the $100 to hire Galatians to farm leathers for me. It can't figure out how to get it to speed my bootup at all. It doesn't hold all of WoW (although most), but it doesn't seem to speed anything up. And about once a month, it decides to dump its flash memory and my system runs at 8088 processor speeds for a half hour while it sorts itself out.

Is there something I'm doing wrong? Should I just disable "Turbo Memory" altogether? How can I do that?
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Turbo_Memory

this is a marketing gimmick. This is nothing more than vista's readyboost..aka using hte flash drive as a faster than your hard disk cachie. What they don't tell you is flash ram has a limited amount of writes per cell and therefore per flash drive. What also has jsut begun to be seen is the wear l3eveling ofr flash drives leave them to fragmet very very badly killing performance..sometimes the drives reset themselves..sometimes they don't. My advice? REmove the cache:

The Robson cache connects via a mini-PCIe card with on-board NAND flash memory modules, supporting new features available in Microsoft Windows Vista, namely ReadyBoost (a hard-drive caching solution via USB flash drives) and ReadyDrive (a hard-drive caching solution via hybrid drives), allowing both read caching and write caching of data. Often this is implemented with a Disk Filtering Option ROM (DFOROM)

Find the card and get rid of it. It's only useful if you don't have enough actual ram..this is basically nothing more than a faster hard disk swap file. You may be able to disable it inside the bios.
 
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noname said:
well your first mistake is using intel.

AMD is far cooler.
Click to expand...

wrong on both counts.

AMD right now can compete on price only. They are now the new p-4's. They run hotter, draw more power, and do less work per clock tick than an intel part clock for clock.
 
oh, if you're buying from Lenovo, since they seem to push this...don't buy it. they apparently don't even install it =/
 
Mine's a Sager ... they didn't push it, it was just there staring me at on the customization screen and I think it was only $85 so I figured "why not." Sigh...

<--Gilgasucker
 
always buy machines stripped as bare as possible...e.g. on mine, i just picked up 2gb, although i did order TM for giggles, and one crappy drive. You can buy replacements on newegg for less.
 
I actually read a review in MaximumPC about the flash memory and it received a very poor rating as far as speed benefits go. It's just not worth it to buy, instead invest in more Ram, 4gb for 32 bit OS and 4gb+ on 64 bit OS, the only reason I didn't grab 64-bit Vista was because of using Quickverse(awesome bible software) and the X-Fi Titanium, Creative 64-bit OS drivers are beta still, but yea invest in more ram, a faster hard drive....anything but the flash ram speed-up.

It's kinda like that Finallyfast tv commercial they make it all sound wonderful then they slap you in the face with...oh wait $19.95 please.
 
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