Make that old PC run PS3 with eBoostr

I'm the kind of guy who'll use a product until it breaks, fix it, break it again, jury-rig it to bring it back to life, break it again, and then finally say that I'm "done" with it. It wasn't until the capacitors started leaking on the mobo of my last PC that I decided to replace it. (At which time, PC parts had already evolved a couple generations so I ended up building a pretty much new whitebox from the ground up. I'll post the parts I used and the costs some other time.)

Up until a couple months ago, the only PC I had was one based around the AM2 Sempron 4000 64-Bit (got it for $19.99 total; read my blog on a daily basis and you'll get wind of plenty of great deals) + 4 gigs of DRAM (which I picked up for about $45 after rebate). The thing rendered large files in Photoshop CS2 and CS3 in the snap of a finger. The only problem was that when my significant other wanted to use the PC to surf the Internet, I had no way to process my photos.

Well, a friend of mine gave me his Dell OptiPlex GX270, which he had bought in 2003 and was planning to ditch anyways. It's a 2.67 gigahertz P4 with 256 MB of memory and runs out of memory whenever I try to run Photoshop on it. I could've bought more memory, but instead I ran across a free solution: Eboostr.

Eboostr basically enables something similar to ReadyBoost and SuperFetch originally designed for Windows Vista for Windows XP. It allows smart caching of frequently used applications and files on both USB and non-USB removable media devices (CF, SD/SDHC, MMC, xD and other memory cards), and additional hard disks. In short, it takes much of the load off your primary hard drive on which your OS is running so that you don't get those "out of memory" error messages with programs like Photoshop. The trial version is fully functional for up to 4 hours with each boot, and allows caching with up to 4 devices of 4 GB each (so you could have 16 GB of additional caching space).

The Eboostr homepage says that it only works with "readyboost" enhanced USB flash drives, but I tried it with 3 flashdrives that I got for free after rebate a while ago: An Ultra 512MB Flydrive, a Kingston 1GB Data Traveler, and a Kingston 2GB Data Traveler.

The program works awesome.

When I was just using the Dell by itself, Photoshop took forever and any operation would result in "out of memory" errors. But now, Photoshop not only loads up a little bit quicker, but I can do all the editing I want in Photoshop on 5-year-old out-of-date PC. It does take longer, but I don't mind watching TV or doing something else while I'm applying this or that filter to one of my digital pictures. Of course, if my SO goes somewhere else, I jump right back into my Mach 5 Photoshop-slaying rig.

So, now I can use this hand-me-done Dell until the capacitors on its mobo rupture as well.

You don't even need a flashdrive. If you own a digital camera, you WILL have some flavor of flash card. Plug this into your USB slot with a card reader and you can run Eboostr off of this.

Try it. How can you beat better performance + FREE?