With the inertia of my previous post on SDD’s,  they are still high priced compared to hard drives but there does exist a happier and much faster medium, which when used correctly, has the possibility to perform just as well if not better than SSD’s in some scenarios. This happy medium turns out to be your RAM. If you have more than 4GB of RAM, I recommend you download Dataram RAMdisk. Essentially, the utility uses RAM instead of writing the data to your 200X slower hard drive. The program will create a hard drive with a TEMP folder. To configure, simply specify how much RAM should be allocated as the hard drive and individually modify each program to store its temporary files in your RAM hard drive.

You may wonder how this is useful and not tedious to modify each program altogether? It turns out there are programs that write to the hard drive more frequently than others. The main culprits turn out to be your internet browser and installation executables. Check with your preferred browser. I know for a fact Chrome will not let you change its TEMP folder directly, but as always, if there is a will, there is a way. As for the installation executable, modify the environment variables to point to the RAM hard drive. In my case, “I” is my RAM hard drive.

The only downside is that because RAM gets deleted at shutdown, so will any temporary files get deleted; in other words, the temporary files that could have speeded up your page loading will not be there. If you think offsetting the cost of slower page browsing is negligible, proceed. If not, simply do not modify the browser's settings.