WARNING: Placing Temporary Internet Files on RAM disk causes some Metro apps to fail

Considering how much RAM most of us have these days, and how little of it we actually use, setting up a relatively small (512mb or so) RAMdisk is a fairly effective way of a) lowering SSD writes, b) speeding up your browsing, and c) helping to ensure your privacy should someone pinch your machine/HDD. Unfortunately, while this works perfectly in Windows 7, there's a catch in Windows 8.

It breaks Metro apps.

Or rather, it breaks the BING Metro apps. That includes Weather, Travel, News, etc. Messaging, E-Mail and People still work, but anything net-centric is basically f**ked. I'm currently looking for a workaround, but anyone doing this and wondering why things aren't working (as I did for about 3 days a month or so ago), there's your reason.

 

Right, from what I can tell, the problem seems to be that RAMdisks aren't recognized as actual volumes; ie, they don't show up in Disk Management / Diskpart. It would seem that these particular Metro apps refer to the hard drive using it's full volume name (ie, \\?\Volume{8a956542-20cc-11e2-be65-806e6f6e6963}\) rather than drive/folder paths. Even setting up a junction/symlink the RAMdrive to an empty NTFS folder on a physical drive doesn't seem to be able to trick Metro into recognizing the new path. Unless anyone knows of a RAMdrive offering which actually spoofs a real volume, I think we're pretty f**ked.