ReadyBoost is a simple way to speed up your Windows Vista by adding a USB Stick (or, in some machines, adding a SD Memory card). ReadyBoost works by caching portions of the pagefile on a USB Stick. It is a very well known fact that the Disk transfer rates exceed Flash Memory transfer rates. However, random reads from Flash can be as much as 10x faster than random reads from your disk.
But the catch is that your Flash memory/USB stick must provide a reasonable transfer rate for random reads. The Best way to find out if it works for your USB stick is to benchmark random reads which is an automatic feature in Windows Vista.
Now lets looks at the easy procedure to enable ReadyBoost to easily Speed Up your Windows Vista :
- First select the USB drive and right click > properties.
- You will get an option to select ReadyBoost and enable/disable it.
- Your Done. (Didn't I say it was easy)
From now on Windows Vista will create a ReadyBoost cache file in your USB drive. This file will be used for small, random reads to the pagefile. I would recomend the ReadyBoost cache be set as 1:1 (ReadyBoost:System Memory) for smaller machines and something in the ratio 2.5:1 for bigger machines.
The only limitation that Microsoft has placed is that there can be only one ReadyBoost file on a machine, and the ReadyBoost file can never be larger than 4GB.
ReadyBoost will greatly improve things when the machine comes under memory pressure and heavy disk activity. In all such cases you will notice that the PC will be noticeable more responsive.