There are a number of conceivable reasons to setup a RamDisk on your Media Center PC. The biggest plausible reason is for the performance increase that can be gained by using a RamDisk as opposed to a Hard Disk to store the temporary files created for time-shifting live TV. In place of writing and erasing this data to your Hard Disk, which is a fair bit slower than RAM and can cause unnecessary wear on your Hard Disk, we can setup a virtual drive that uses RAM instead. The down side of using a RamDisk is that the data must be saved to the Hard Drive before shutting down or it will be lost forever. Also, in regard to Windows 7 Media Center, the files we are going to be using this drive for are quite large and will require somewhat extreme amounts of ram. For instance, an hour of SD programming will require anywhere from 3-4gb and an hour of HD programming will require approximately 7-8gb. This means you’ll need around 16gb of RAM on top of your base system RAM to keep a 2 hour buffer for HD programming. If you meet this steep level of entry the let’s get started. The first thing you’ll need is a copy of QSoft’s RamDisk. Navigating their website can be somewhat tricky so we’ve provided copies of the RamDisk x64 Evaluation and Preferences program for download. Purchasing a copy of the non-time limited software is as little as $12 which is extraordinary as well. Now to get started, the installation process is somewhat difficult for novice users so let’s go over that in detail now. Extract the software to your hard drive and open your Control Panel. Next go to Hardware and Sound then open Device Manager. Continue reading “Setting Up A RamDisk Scratch Drive for Windows 7 Media Center” »