Holy crap, a Windows ramdisk program that works

In the past, I've had a bit of experience trying to install and run ramdisks in Windows XP, but I never found anything really good. Microsoft provided a ramdisk driver for Windows 2000 that one could get working in XP, but it wasn't really useful because it only provided a maximum of 32 MB of storage (Why ?!). I decided to revisit the issue of ramdisks at work today for Windows 7 because I wanted a way to speed up Visual Studio's caching and other operations (and Eclipse, but that's another matter). After searching around some more, I found a program called ImDisk. The installation is dead easy (if a little lacking in the notification department to tell you it's successfully installed). What's even better, you can make disks of arbitrary size, have it simulate various kinds of devices, and you can setup multiple ramdisks. The only catch is that you have to start the service in Administrator mode, and it's a bit more than trivial, though it is easy using the following steps :

1. Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt -> Right-click -> Run as administrator
2. sc config imdisk start= auto (note the space between start= and auto, this got me the first time)
3. net start imdisk
4. Open up Control Panel -> ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver

... and have at it!

A moment of developer clarity and zen

I had a moment today where I was just letting my mind wander. It was one of those moments where you have a brilliant idea that just seems so common sense that you can only ask yourself "Why the hell didn't I think of that before ?" This moment of clarity happened to be concerning my horribly slow laptop, with it's horribly old ATA 100, 5400 rpm hard drive. Then it occurred to me : just like with video encoding that I had setup months ago, I could setup a RAM disk to speed up Eclipse by storing my workspace on the RAM disk to speed up access to all the (ridiculous number of) temp files that Eclipse uses. On Ubuntu Linux, it turns out this was ridiculously easy : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=182764

The really amazing part was just how much this sped things up : it took my project build time from 6 mins, 30 seconds down to 35 seconds. And those are real numbers (plus or minus a couple seconds, due to slight variations in repeated builds.)