Wednesday, September 15, 2010

How to Speed up Firefox by Running it in RAM

As the speed of Internet access continues to increase, the slow link in browsing the Internet is becoming the browser itself. Firefox is a leader in the game to make the browser faster and provide content in a variety of media. One speed-increasing innovation is the ability to run the browser from a RAM disk. The program responds faster because the computer is able to bypass the slower hard disk.

1.
Step 1
Download the latest copy of Firefox Portable. This version is faster than the original in that the portable version doesn't track history or build a cache. You will also need to download a RAM disk utility. There are many versions available so pick your favorite. A RAM disk uses a portion of your computer's RAM to make a pseudo disk drive. It makes accessing the information stored on the drive much quicker than going to the hard disk to access it. The drive will appear on your computer as drive B. The typical size is 32MB but can be as large as 64MB.
2.
Step 2
Open Notepad and create a batch file that will execute at system startup to copy the portable version of Firefox to the RAM disk. This will make sure that Firefox is resident and ready to run from RAM when you want to browse the Internet. Create the file, naming it load_firefox.bat and the only code that will be in the batch file will be: XCOPY C:\FIREFOX\*.* B:\FIREFOX\ /E /Y /C. Enter the text exactly as written here, then close and save the file. Place the file in the Startup folder so that it loads Firefox each time the system starts.
3.
Step 3
Create a second batch file that will copy all Firefox settings back to the hard disk before the computer shuts down. Name this file, save_firefox.bat. The code in this file is: XCOPY B:\FIREFOX\*.* C:\FIREFOX\ /E /Y. Again, copy this exactly and save the file to your desktop. Once Firefox is shut down, you can execute this file to copy all the settings back to the hard drive so that when you start next time you will have the same settings. When you execute the file, it will copy the entire contents of your RAM disk back to the hard disk, replacing the version that was there when you started the computer.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts with Thumbnails

Pages