Laptop Thoughts: News & Reviews on Laptops, Netbooks, Slates, and More.

"To improve your netbook's performance without swapping out the netbook, you normally need to install additional RAM. It'll let you boot your OS much quicker, run many applications simultaneously, and access data quicker. But this involves buying RAM, opening up the netbook and installing it. For netbooks we do not want or do not have access to such situations to upgrade RAM as we wish. And if you've used up all your RAM slots it's game over. There is another way, and none is easier and more technically elegant than to use the next little software tool eBoostr. To see if the software works, we used an ASUS Eee PC 701 to test the application's performance."

Here's proof that if you wait long enough, technology repeats itself. Back in the dark ages (1980s / 1990s), a RAMDrive (aka RAMDisk) was a method of using computer memory that the OS ignored (between 768K and 1MB, for example, in DOS), providing a significant performance boost. Today, we have eBoostr, designed for underpowered and low-memory devices like netbooks, the difference being that it uses an external device like an SD card or USB flash drive that can be configured to act (almost) like a memory upgrade/cache. And, caching is always faster than physical I/O to a spinning hard drive, so performance is boosted. No stats were available, and the product is still in beta, so no information is available on general availability or price, and remember, YMMV.

Keeping in mind of course that this is a video from RIM, it's still hard to dismiss the differences shown in the video - the Playbook appears to handily beat the iPad in terms of browser performance. But performance isn't everything; it needs to be balanced off against battery life. The iPad has a single core Cortex A8 processor at 1 Ghz; the RIM Playbook has two cores, possibly based on the Cortex A9 processor. So while it performance faster, it might also chew through battery life faster - until the final specs are known, and independent battery tests can be performed, it's too early to make a call. Still, things are looking good for the RIM Playbook!