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Intel Turbo Memory and Windows 7

Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2010 4:03 am
by ChipsAndSolder
My X61t has a 4GB Intel turbo memory card in it but now that I upgraded to Win 7 64-bit, I can't enable the old ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive features even through the Turbo Memory console still runs.

I read posts in the past that say turbo memory is not supported in Win 7 and I wonder if this is still the case or am I just looking at the wrong UI.

Thanks,

Re: Intel Turbo Memory and Windows 7

Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2010 12:15 pm
by loyukfai
Have you installed the driver?

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-67820

Cheers.

Re: Intel Turbo Memory and Windows 7

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2010 10:56 pm
by ChipsAndSolder
Thanks for the driver reference. The lenovo driver installed fine.

I then brought up the Intel Turbo Memory Console which gave me the option to enable both Windows ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive -- great I thought.

I checked the ReadyDrive option and it prompted me to restart the machine. Following the restart, I displayed the Turbo Memory Console again and both ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive were disabled and their option check boxes were also greyed out.

The only thing that looked right was the display of the turbo memory size: 4GB.

I've tried uninstalling and re-installing several times but always the same result: both options disabled and check boxes greyed out.

I'm wondering if anyone else has had this experience installing TM. I should also mention my laptop has 8GB and is running win 7 x64.

Thanks for the help so far.

Re: Intel Turbo Memory and Windows 7

Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2010 9:38 am
by ThinkRob
ChipsAndSolder wrote: I'm wondering if anyone else has had this experience installing TM. I should also mention my laptop has 8GB and is running win 7 x64.
If you have 8GB of RAM, don't bother with Turbo Memory. Heck, if you had 2GB of RAM, I'd still say the same. It's a mostly-useless technology.

Re: Intel Turbo Memory and Windows 7

Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2010 2:52 pm
by ChipsAndSolder
I guess 8GB sounds like a lot but when doing software development with a virtual machine loaded it's just OK.

That's why I wanted to play with the Turbo memory and user pinning in particular to see if I can get some improvents in application load times.

Unfortunately, I can't get my X61t to turn on any of the features. :(

Re: Intel Turbo Memory and Windows 7

Posted: Sat Dec 18, 2010 11:35 am
by ThinkRob
ChipsAndSolder wrote:I guess 8GB sounds like a lot but when doing software development with a virtual machine loaded it's just OK.

That's why I wanted to play with the Turbo memory and user pinning in particular to see if I can get some improvents in application load times.
Just get an SSD. Even a cheap one will be worlds better for that sort of workload. Running multiple VMs simultaneously is absolutely the sort of thing for which an SSD is tremendously beneficial.

Re: Intel Turbo Memory and Windows 7

Posted: Sat Dec 18, 2010 1:06 pm
by ChipsAndSolder
An SSD would be nice but my VMs are about 35GB each on disk so I run a 500GB HHD at the moment. I don't want to spend the $$$ on a large SSD so that's why the turbo memory sounded interesting.

I kind of wonder if the I've run out of addressing in the machine. If I have 8GB of RAM, maybe there's not enough address space left for the extra 4GB of TM? I didn't think this was going to be an issue but maybe the address space is related through the virtual memory manager on the machine.

Re: Intel Turbo Memory and Windows 7

Posted: Sat Dec 18, 2010 10:33 pm
by ThinkRob
ChipsAndSolder wrote: I kind of wonder if the I've run out of addressing in the machine. If I have 8GB of RAM, maybe there's not enough address space left for the extra 4GB of TM? I didn't think this was going to be an issue but maybe the address space is related through the virtual memory manager on the machine.
Turbo Memory doesn't get mapped into the main address space like that.