Using Flash Drives to Speed up SC4!

[Psycho_Teddy 25]

Note: This topic will only apply to those using Vista, XP and lower are not supported.

If you are having problems with random crashing, please read.

If you have a portable mass storage device of some sort, with 256MB of available space or more, you can use these devices as 'RAM' (since these devices contain flash memory, which is what RAM is composed of).  This is not virtual memory, however, it is still (depending on your read/write speeds for the device, and whether or not it's USB 2.0) a tad slower than RAM, I have found.  Here is how to do it:

1.) When you plug in the device, VIsta should create an autorun menu.

2.) You will notice at the bottom of the menu, it says "Increase my system's performance using readyboost", click it.

3.)  I would give it a couple of minutes before opening SC4.  For some reason, I don't know why, it takes a couple of minutes to get the device up and running using readyboost.

4.) Load SC4, you will notice that there are certainly less crashing, and the game may even run a bit quicker (once again, depending on the device).

In my experience, using readyboost has drastically reduced the frequency of random crashes in the game and has even sped up the game.  My game, before using readyboost, crashed every 15-20 minutes, maybe even sooner (and I have 4GB of Virtual Memory set up).  Now, I have let the game run for over an hour, and the only reason the game shut down was because I shut down the game, after having played a full session.   I hope this helps somebody!

[EDIT]: I am using my PSP with a 2GB Memory Stick Duo fro this purpose, but I have used a 1GB Cruzer Micro flash drive.  Just about anything with flash memory will work for this purpose.

[Tropod 144]

That's interesting way of increasing pc resources. I dare say though, that the fact that it didn't crash using the additional USB Flash drive, personally I would be inclined to think there's a possible hard drive issue.

I had a similar problem; had a page file set up on an older hard drive (in addition to existing VM) & found that it would constantly/consistently crash/freeze the whole PC, especially when using applications that were very RAM intensive. So I removed the paging file on the older hard drive, and it was no longer a problem.