Winxdows ReadyBoost

[007stuart]

Today I picked up a freebie at an exhibition which looked like a credit card but was actually a 4gb usb drive. I tried it today and a pop up box appeared with an option to use the drive as additional RAM. So I thought nothing ventured nothing gained and now I must admit I was very sceptical however ReadyBoost has really helped my 5yr Acer laptop and now everything seems to run quicker.

Does anyone else use this?

[Taf]

I tried it with standard USB sticks and found they slowed everything down. But then I tried a high speed type and things improved a lot. A lot faster than relying on Virtual Memory on the Hard Drive.

[Matth]

The less RAM you have, the more readyboost helps - once RAM is plentiful, then the overhead of managing readyboost may exceed the benefit.

I readyboosted a 1GB RAM netbook, but stopped using readyboost after upping the RAM to 2GB

[qasdfdsaq]

This feature has been around for seven years, and yes it was useful last decade but has been removed now because it's mostly pointless on modern machines.

[Stop It]

Readyboost certainly had a use, for Netbooks and low end systems but for anything resembling a decent system it didn't do much.

I did play with for a while but as my system was certainly not low end it just made things slower. I currently have 16GB of RAM so barely need a pagefile, let alone this but keep the idea in my head if helping people with old systems.

[qasdfdsaq]

Yeah it's also largely dependent on the USB drive's read and write speeds, if they're slower than your HDD it doesn't help. Hence Microsoft built-in to Windows a function to speedtest every USB stick you connect before allowing it to be used for ReadyBoost, but even then the standards were fairly low, only 2.5MB/sec.

Although high-end modern USB drives can reach hundreds of megabytes per second, they cost several times more than an equally sized and faster SSD anyway.