Speed up your computer with Windows Readyboost
Windows Vista has a new feature called Readyboost that allows you to plug in your removable media, such as your USB flash device or Smartcards, to store commonly used files for quicker access. Often mistaken for RAM replacement, keep in mind that RAM is much superior than the USB device you use with Readyboost.
Rather than let you decide, Windows Vista makes the decision on whether to enable Readyboost on your device. So before you run outside and get yourself a USB, you’ll want to know the requirements for your USB flash device or Smartcard for Readyboost to be enabled.
- 2.5 MB/sec for 512KB random writes across the device
- 3.5 MB/sec for 4KB random reads across the device
- A minimum of 230 MB space
If you’ve disabled the Readyboost service, you’ll want to enable it now. Plug in your USB device and you’ll receive a prompt:
Choose Speed up my system and you’ll be taken to the Readyboost properties of your device. You can then use the slider to reserve a certain amount of space for Readyboost.
When using Readyboost, I recommend that you use this in conjunction with Superfetch.
Still need help? Check out our new forums where you can get an even faster and better response!
October 14th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
We have tested ReadyBoost under a number of conditions using a large variety of USB flash drives and found that the average thumb drives don’t make the grade when it comes to speeding up Vista using the ReadyBoost feature. In fact, if the thumb drive is too slow, ReadyBoost won’t access it at all.
After testing 22 different flash drives, we found that the only ones that showed a notable increase in benchmark scores are those capable of 30MB/sec reads & 20MB/sec writes. Out of the 22 tested, the 2GB Corsair Flash Voyager GT came out on top in every test…but beware of the non-GT models.