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 The last few months there has been a great interest around SSD drives and their 0.1ms access time. We all want to get an SSD ASAP but the prices are still too high. However there is software that can create a drive on your computer using its memory. This means that they are even faster than SSDs. Of course the great disadvantage is that these drives are deleted once you turn off your computer. So a good solution is not to use them for storing data but for common tasks that need to be performed like web browsing. In reality, using a portable browser like firefox 3.0 on a ramdrive is so very fast. After doing so I can switch tabs instantly and open a lot of pages with flash at the same time. These were tasks that had a delay once the browser was on my hard drive. So here are the instructions on how to set this up. It won’t take more than 5 minutes:):

Requirements:

Grab the following files:
Ramdisk: http://www.box.net/shared/htpmm1zm8e
Firefox Portable: http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

Instructions:

Unpack Ramdisk to a location on your harddrive. Run ramdisk.exe, select install ramdisk. A warming might come up so click to allow the driver to be installed. Once installed you can set the size of the ramdisk and the drive letter. Click ok, the system will restart.

Once the system is restarted you will find a new drive. This is a drive that stays on memory. All the data in that drive will be deleted once you reboot. However if you just copy the portable version of firefox 3.0 in that drive (it takes 2-3 seconds to copy it) you will be enjoying the fastest ever possible web browsing.

So for firefox, execute the file you downloaded and point the installer to your desktop. After the installation finishes you will have a folder named “FirefoxPortable” on your desktop. Each time your computer restarts, simply drop that folder on your ramdisk and  run FirefoxPortable.exe from that location. Browsing will be very fast especially on sites with flash like youtube or vimeo for example.

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