> Some years ago, Windows Vista offered users who plugged in a USB flash

> drive the option of using the device as extra ram.

Sort of, see...

... back in the Windows Vista days USB drives may have had better performance than mechanical hard disk. As always a program would be loaded from a hard drive into RAM and then instructions would be read in from

RAM and they would be executed by the CPU. The data files that program needed to use could be moved from the hard disk drive to a USB drive. Thus when the executing program called for data from a data file, then it was retrieved quicker from the USB drive.

The only real way of increasing RAM is to plug more in if you have spare slots or pull out low capacity RAM and replace it with higher capacity RAM.

Many DDR2 computers only have two RAM slots. While single 4GB DDR2 DIMM's were manufactured they are rare. So there is not much chance of getting 2 x 4GB DDR2's and having a 8GB computer and if its a 32 bit CPU then its only going to access the first 4GB of RAM. The best you are likely to find is 2GB DDR2 DIMM's which will give you a 4GB computer.

Probably the best way to speed up an old computer with DDR2 RAM and with a Sata disk drive, is to replace the mechanical disk drive with a solid state drive. As well as the OS and applications, place a large swapfile on the solid state drive. When the use of the computer results in it running out of RAM and needing to swap, then swapping to a solid state drive is an almost tolerable amount of time to wait. Swapping to a mechanical drive is likely to be intolerable.

Some developers find swapping so intolerable that they don't have a swap file and whenever they run out of RAM they prefer the system to crash and reboot so they can get back to work than to sit there watching massive amounts of disk i/o accessing the swap file while they can do nothing. As in, if they are writing a program and it has a memory leak that consumes all the RAM, then they want to get on with fixing the memory leak rather than watch a system performing swapping because of a memory leak.

The rule-of-thumb that I would suggest you apply these days is that if a computer has less than 4GB of RAM and a mechanical disk drive then don't even bother turning it on. Get something better from a recycler and pick up a solid state drive from PB-Tech. You probably only need a 100GB solid state drive for your OS, applications and swap. If you have lots many gigabytes of photos or movies then put your /home partition on a large mechanical drive.

cheers,

Ian.