from Hacking Windows 7 Media Center by Michael Healy
Much of the data retrieved by Media Browser is stored on the hard drive and needs to be retrieved frequently as you browse through your movie collection. Information such as movie metadata and covers is constantly being loaded up as you browse through your movie folders. This data retrieval process leads to some extremely slow performance in large collections and it doesn’t get much more frustrating than knowing what movie you want to watch and taking forever to get to the right listing so you can play it. Luckily, there is something we can do about it.
The idea comes from Washy on the Media Browser forums and is much like our previous guides on speeding up the Live TV buffer using a RamDisk or using a flash drive. For this guide we’re going the flash drive route because the amount of data we’re working with is somewhat prohibitive in regard to using a RAMDisk. It would require quite a bit of spare RAM to operate the disk for Media Browser’s data but using a fairly inexpensive flash disk like the Patriot Xporter XT Boost 4GB Flash Drive can really speed up access times when browsing through your library without spending much money.
Once you’ve got your flash drive ready setting up Media Browser to use it instead of the default location is fairly simple…
Read the rest of this entry at Hack7MC >>>
Catch more of Michael's reflections on Windows 7 Media Center at Hack7MC. I’ve followed Michael’s articles for quite a while now and am pleased that Michael has agreed to contribute some of his excellent Windows 7 Media Center articles to GeekTonic for the next few weeks.
