Speed Up Vista with ReadyBoost

Want to speed up your Windows Vista PC? Adding system memory (RAM) is often the best way to improve a PC’s performance, since more memory means more applications are ready to run without accessing the hard drive. However, upgrading memory can be difficult and costly, and some machines (esp. notebooks) have limited memory expansion capabilities, making it awkward to add RAM.

Windows Vista introduces a new way to boost your systems speed with ReadyBoost. Its aim is to make computers running Windows Vista more responsive by using flash memory on a USB 2.0 drive, SD card, CompactFlash, or other form of flash memory, in order to boost system performance.

The flash memory device serves as an additional memory cache-that is, memory that the computer can access much more quickly than it can access data on the hard drive.

When you first insert your flash media, Vista checks to see if its performance is fast enough for ReadyBoost to work. It needs to meet the minimum performance and space requirements:

• The device must be at least 64 MB
• The device must be USB 2.0
• It has to be able to read at 3.5 MB/s
• It has to be able to write at 2.5 MB/s

If it is suitable, you are asked if you want to use this device to speed up system performance. You can choose to allocate part of a USB drive’s memory to speed up performance and use the remainder to store files

As you can gather from this short article, this method is about 1000 times less painful than removing your keyboard.

[tags]Windows Vista[/tags]