Technology Easy Flash Drive Laptop Solution    3/14/08 32GB SSD Upgrade 11/24/08 Sony VAIO TXN15 My ultralite notebook weighs in just under 3 lbs and with its LED backlit screen and throttled CPU speed (dropping from 1.2 GHz to 800 MHz in the Ultimate Battery power mode) can easilly deliver all day operation (7-8 hours). I love it: light, bright, capable. It has firewire, 2 USB 2.0, SD and MemoryStick slots, PC card slot, removable battery, WI-FI and EVO broad band, 1.5GB RAM and 80GB hard drive. But the 1.8" 4200 RPM hard drive is no speed demon. After recently upgrading to Office 2007, I noticed Word would take a full minute to open up, especially when launching it by double-clicking on a .doc file. I've scanned for viruses, malware, spyware, junkware. It's clean. Still takes way too long to come up. I investigated several alternatives: 1. Replace the hard drive with one of the new SSDs (solid state flash drive). They are faster but at least 5 times as expensive. 2. Get a high capacity SD flash card and use it for read-mostly data storage (mp3's, jpgs's, pdf's, etc). These are becoming available in 16GB and even 32GB sizes. 3. Use a caching utility in conjunction with the SD card. 16GB SD Card I ordered a 16GB SDHC flash card from Tiger Direct for $75 and now I see them for $65 on some other sites. As usual, prices inevitably drop after you order. But the drivers that came with my VAIO only supported up to 2GB flash cards. So I downloaded the latest driver from the Sony website and now the full 16GB shows up! The card came formatted for FAT32 and ready to go. eBoostr speedometer icon in system tray This interesting piece of software is available from www.eboostr.com in a fully functional demo version that runs for 4 hours after each reboot. I tested it initially on a rather slow 2GB SD card that I picked up in the checkout bins at MicroCenter. Even with the 1.4X speed improvement I could definitely notice a faster return from hibernation and opening up Word. After getting the 16GB card, I was anxious to see how much faster the class 6 SDHC chip would be. eBoostr supports up to 4 separate caches with a maximum size of 4GB for each cache. After installation it allocates a contigous block of space for each cache (which took about 10 minutes for 4GB). I only set up a single cache (on drive E:) and plan to use the remaining 12GB for read-mostly file storage. Speed Checking can be run from within the eBoostr control panel application. Preparing checks "Current hard disk speed" for 16 1/2 minutes Then "Direct access speed" also to the hard drive which displays the hard disk LED on continuously while reporting an speed of 0.68-0.75 MB/s. This goes for 7 more minutes. Then it checks the Flash drive speed by copying data from the hard drive to the flash drive (both indicator LEDs flash). This takes just under 2 minutes. Then "Cache enabled access speed" reporting 2.01-2.23 also taking about 2 minutes. A performance ratio is finally calculated by dividing the direct access HD speed of 0.747 by the cache enabled access speed using the SDHC card of 2.204381 average reporting it to be 2.951894 or about 3 times faster.