Moving desktop folder to a ramdisk to improve performance in win 10?

Be careful about doing that, if during important changes the ramdisk vanishes or stops working -- there could be mismatches between desktop and remaining OS. It's after midnight, I'm pecking each letter on a screen-keyboard, on a samsung tablet...writing becomes twilight zone.

quicksilverstud said:

Im aware how old the book is. But how would moving desktop to a ramdisk not have the same effect now that it did back then? I mean id use dataram ramdisk or something of that sort.
Theres even a tutorial on the forum on how to move desktop to another drive.

Because the tutorial was written at a time when physical RAM was very expensive and disk access was very slow (and manual defragging was a fact of life)... so it made sense to use memory management to create a virtual store for temporary files. These days temporary files are much, much larger so the advice in the book is way out of date and there's less need to use RAM disks to eke out performance, particularly if you're using an SSD for the OS drive. Note that the crux of the advice at the time was about temporary files, not the desktop itself.

By all means use a RAM disk but NOT for the desktop. Windows expects the logged-on user's desktop in a permanent (albeit movable) location, not a temporary location that has to be created each sign-in.

Instead, consider creating a folder - e.g. C:\TEMP - and use that as a temporary storage area, including changing the TMP/TEMP environment variables for both System and User to point to this new location.

At least then you won't have to think about cleaning C:\Windows\Temp and C:\Users\<logged-on user>\AppData\Local\Temp folders.

(I've never tried it - nor would I - but I wouldn't be surprised if Windows didn't just barf and refuse to load if you tried to redirect users' Desktop folders to a RAM drive.)

With SSD there is little point in moving Desktop to RamDisk. Anyway it would have to be persistent (save contents to RamDisk and load on boot)

You could use a RamDisk for your browser cache but you don't even need to do that if using Firefox (or variants) because you can move cache to RAM anyway.

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quicksilverstud said:

And i was brought to a section talking about away that involves moving the desktop folder in windows to a ramdisk and that the ramdisk would have to be 1.5mb in order to do so and in return you'll have a speedy desktop.

I can not thank you enough. You have solved 2 problems, I have been struggling with for a looong time.

1. I download to desktop and to I remove downloaded files with a command, so I would not have to select all files, right click on them and press delete, that takes a lot of time and precision. But the command does not allow to remove a folder without restoring it laker, but that it not possible with a desktop folder.

2. I wanted to move downloads to ramdisk, so it would take off some write operations from SSD, but I still prefer to download to desktop, it is more comfortable, but moving desktop via a symlink causes problems.


As you suggested, I moved desktop to ramdisk and it works flawlessly.

Code:

md "Z:\Desktop"
reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders" /v "Desktop" /t REG_SZ /d "Z:\Desktop" /f
reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders" /v "{754AC886-DF64-4CBA-86B5-F7FBF4FBCEF5}" /t REG_EXPAND_SZ /d "Z:\Desktop" /f
reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders" /v "Desktop" /t REG_EXPAND_SZ /d "Z:\Desktop" /f

I can also cleanse it easily. Thanks again.

Code:

rd "Z:\Desktop" /s /q
md "Z:\Desktop"

As for software options, I use AMD, the free version is limited to 4 GB, the other one is digitally unsigned.

AMD Radeon(TM) RAMDisk or ImDisk Toolkit

RickC said:

(I've never tried it - nor would I - but I wouldn't be surprised if Windows didn't just barf and refuse to load if you tried to redirect users' Desktop folders to a RAM drive.)

Ramdisk loads before user's profile, so it should not be a problem, unless ramdisk fails to load, it can happen, so keeping an empty folder in the original location is preferable.

I thought I earlier read moving Desktop to ramdisk is risky.