What flash drive are you using for eBoostr? I've been thinking of trying it out on a couple of older XP machines that could use the performance boost.

I was bored one day and i filled out this forum to request more information from Columbia College and they shipped me a free 2GB flash drive preloaded with their college stuff on it. It wasn't anything special. It doesn't have to be high performance drive or anything. The 20MB read speed I was getting was the cached-enabled access times. Without eboostr the drive was probably only able to read at half that, with write speeds of around 4-5MB/sec. Nothing fancy. Really makes Server 2008 more snappier I can tell you that. I was working on a buddys computer a few days ago and i was upgrading his AV, installing crap I had put on my flash drive (Columbia college one) and I completely forgot I left the USB drive in the front usb port and when we went took side panel off to see how many memory slots he had I bent the connector all to hell and it doesnt work no more. LOL so now I am just using my RAM stick as a caching device in eboostr. I have 4GB installed on my machine and I allocated 512MB to eboostr. Boot times aren't as fast as it was on USB stick but I've only taken a 5 second drop in boot time. Not bad.

Thanks.
I've mostly been using flash drives for storage (and the occasional OS install), so I haven't really cared about read/write speeds that much, just capacity. I just benchmarked my 4 GB Cruzer and it averages at 24 MB/s, which sounds good enough. I'll try it out on an older XP machine with 1 GB RAM and see how it goes.

No problem. When you allocate X amount of RAM to your stick, it will create a hidden folder called "Eboostr" on the root of your drive. So if you ever need to free up space without formatting your stick you can just show hidden files and folder and delete the eboostr folder to restore your space. Not saying you will ever need to do this, but occasionally when you need to store a large ISO (for example an OS) you can temporarily remove eboostr and just re-allocate it later. Also I believe you can just resize the allocation space within the GUI itself. I never tried that cause I always had a fixed number that I liked to use.

While eBoostr appears to be a fine product that delivers on promises made, as does SuperFetch and et al. -- I can't help wondering with the ridiculous amount of RAM installed on so many systems if it might not just be more efficient in some cases considering how many Workstation actually are used and the kinds of application run -- if all the elaborate automated memory management were just disabled (as well as other fancy clever automation), and the User just left all the applications he regularly uses running -- if more resonsive results might be achieved...

Many Windows Users that I'm familiar with have cultured habits of what I guess I'd call 'resource hygiene' probably based on experience learned with systems with less available memory, and the performance hit from having too much running at once. But I see a lot of UNIX, Linux and OSX Users don't have this proclivity and have virtually everything they use running all the time... Windows is also strapped with a user interface that makes managing a lot of open applications less 'tidy' and more manually intensive then some of the Linux Window Mangers like the TWM's; so this may play a role as well...

The exception to all of this would appear to be those those really resource intensive applications and games that 'need everything', but then again: shouldn't Windows more efficiently manage resources of running applications and not really benefit from cache and automated memory management offered by tools like eBoostr and SuperFetch if everything is always running?

Sounds like a server to me. After all this is what Windows Server does best. Nice insight you have provided Hoak, but I can see a small problem with this. Memory leak. Some applications I've used in the past are sad excuses/poorly written and run a muck in Task Manager. I think it would depend solely on how much RAM you have. It can be managed too. For example you can use Windows Resource Manager to prevent memory leaks in Windows Server. One application that could definitely benefit from your idea is Firefox. I've loaded Firefox several times after startup and when I leave my computer idle for awhile and click Firefox again I notice it is still sluggish to load. Leaving it on would definitely yield a performance gain.

which is more I/O read intense----> win7 or winsrv08r2?

Well you'd have to qualify the answer for it to be factual and useful; for example: for default installations Windows 7 will be more disk i/o intensive due to SuperFetch, the Indexing Service, et al..

For customized configurations where both Operating Systems are running a rougly contrugent complement of services and processes with similar settings -- i/o traffic should be roughly the same, though Server 2008 R2 may still come up a little quieter...

What's wrong in Superfetch? I enabled it in r2 and it seems to be working, not sure how I can test it. There are some .pf files in the prefetch folder already, does it means everything works?