What is Readyboost?
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For Laymen
ReadyBoost is a Vista-specific technology that acts as "fake RAM", speeding up important tasks and leaving any background tasks for the main RAM to take care of. Whatever you are actively working on gets priority over other secondary tasks. Anything with flash memory (and compatible with ReadyBoost) can be used. This means flash drives, SD cards, Compact Flash cards, and even some MP3 players.
For Technophiles (or How it Works)
SuperFetch is a technology within Vista that keep track of your computing habits and maneuvers RAM and processing power accordingly to give you the best speed and power at any given time for current tasks. ReadyBoost devices allow SuperFetch another place to cache data. Commonly used applications are cached on the device leaving the main RAM to work seperately than the ReadyBoost device.
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How to Use ReadyBoost
For best results, use a flash drive that is 2 GB to 4GB. ReadyBoost can utilize from 512 MB to 8 GB, but there is a point of overkill possible. Plug in your device and when the Autoplay window pops up, select Speed Up My System. Then choose the amount of space you want to use. It is recommended that you pick 2-3 times amount of RAM you have in your computer. For example, if you have 1 GB of RAM, then select 3 GB to use.
Things to Keep In Mind
Remember that if you use most of the flash drive on ReadyBoost, don't attempt to save data to it. It's easy to forget you're using the flash drive for ReadyBoost.
Also, you will probably note the biggest difference on 512 MB and 1 GB RAM machines. With 2 GB, 3 GB, and 4 GB, data is already traveling at a good rate of speed, but something that requires a lot of RAM, like video editing or burning CD/DVDs, ReadyBoost will have a good impact on high-end machines.
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I've used ReadyBoost in the past and it helped greatly to improve system performance. Even though I haven't used it in recent months since I bought a memory upgrade, I still keep it around if I have a large process to work on. Nice Hub!
solarshingles 4 years ago
Gregory, thank you very much for this post about better use of ReadyBoost. I've already heard about it, but I've never really paid attention to understand it. I've got one 1GB and one 4GB USB Kingston DataTraveler stiks, but I almost haven't used the, even though I've got only 1.2GB of RAM. Thanks again!