In light of the well-received Windows 7, it’s hard to ignore that XP is getting on in years. Nonetheless, it’s still pretty prevalent in netbooks. Part of the problem for netbook owners is that XP is an OS developed well before SSDs were a glimmer in systems makers’ eyes.

NetworkWorld’s Jon L. Jacobi takes FlashFire for a spin and discovers a genuinely solid little piece of software that works wonders on SSD access times. How it works exactly only the utility’s author knows, but Jacobi thinks it boils down to some clever little trickery (in the best sense). He writes:

The author’s wiki describes FlashFire as a ram buffer. I’m not certain of the details, but since SSDs perform at their worst when reading and writing simultaneously, my guess is that the software caches and delays writes. Delaying writes means there’s a small chance for data loss or file system corruption if your system crashes before data in the buffer is written.

As with all software of this type, use it at your own risk.

Source: NetworkWorld