Speed Up Windows Vista using ReadyBoost

ReadyBoost - Using Your USB 2.0Flash Driveto Speed Up Windows Vista One very cool feature of Windows Vista especially for machines not natively equipped with the kind of horsepower to fully enjoy the rich visuals of Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) applications is ReadyBoost. ReadyBoost enables you to plug a USB key into your machine and have Windows Vista use it as memory.

Installing/Configuring the USB 2.0Flash Driveas Memory First I took a standard USB 2.0 key (Ill list the prerequisites shortly) and plugged it into my machine. Upon plugging the USB key into my computer, I was greeted with the standard "AutoPlay" dialog box asking how I wanted to the operating system to treat the USB key. However, with ReadyBoost I get the additional option (circled below in the screen capture) of using the key to "speed up my system".

Once I click the "Speed up my system" option, the Properties dialog box for the device is displayed where I can specify to start/stop ReadyBoost usage of the device and how much space I want used as a memory cache. (Actually, according to one of the Product Specialists here, this space is used more as a flash-based page file than true RAM, but the impact is that the more space you choose here, the more benefit youll get in terms of overall system performance.)

(In order to return to this dialog box, open the Computer window, right-click the drive (F: in this case) and select Properties. From there, click the Memory tab (as shown in the previous screen capture and adjust the settings as needed).

For the inquisitive, opening the drive in an Explorer window reveals that ReadyBoost has created a cache file of the specified size.

Things to Know About ReadyBoost If you have a USB key configured to use ReadyBoost and then insert a second key, Windows Vista will display the Properties dialog box where youll see the message on the Memory tab as shown in the following screen capture.

While ReadyBoost will work with other devices such as SD Card, CompactFlash, etc. Ive only used it with a USB key and here are the baseline requirements the team gave me regarding what ReadyBoost will work with:

The capacity of the removable media must be at least 256 MB Devices larger than 4GB will have only 4GB used for ReadyBoost The device should have an access time of 1ms or less The device must be capable of 2.5 MB/s read speeds for 4 kB random reads spread uniformly across the entire device and 1.75 MB/s write speeds for 512 kB random writes spread uniformly across the device The device must have at least 235 MB of free space NTFS and FAT32 are supported The initial release of ReadyBoost supports onlyONE device

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