Improving Performance in Vista and Windows 7 with ReadyBoost

Improving Performance in Vista and Windows 7 with ReadyBoost

Especially on older systems, the more strain you can take off of critical components, the better.  Windows Vista and Windows 7 have a feature called ReadyBoost, which works by using a USB 2.0 drive, SD Card, Compact Flash, flash memory or any kind of portable flash mass storage system as a drive for disk cache.  It works because flash memory has a faster access time than typical hard drives.  While upgrading your RAM is primarily your best bet to get a performance increase, if this that isn’t an option or you have a USB stick lying around and want increased performance this is a great way to put it to use.

Setting up this feature is quick and painless.  Simply insert a compatible flash card or USB drive, go to My Computer, Right Click on the device, select the ReadyBoost tab, then select use this device and manually select the amount you would like to dedicate to ReadyBoost.   Microsoft recommends 1 to 3 times the amount of installed RAM to be dedicated to ReadyBoost.  So if you have 1 gig of memory installed, set it from 1 to 3 gigs.  Click apply, ok, and you’re all set.

Most users find that the FAT32 file system works the quickest.  While using ReadyBoost on your memory card, that amount a space will not be available for files, however you still can store items on the rest of the free space.  You’ll also want to make sure that you remember to ‘Safely Remove the Device’ before removing your flash memory.

Now for the technical side:

• The removable media’s capacity must be at least 256 MB—250 MB after formatting. Windows Vista is limited to using 4GB; this restriction has been removed in Window 7.
• The device must have an access time of 1 ms or less.
• The device must be capable of 2.5 MB/s read speeds for 4 KB random reads spread uniformly across the entire device, and 1.75 MB/s write speeds for 512 KB random writes spread uniformly across the device.   (This is usually stated on the packaging, and a lot of USB Thumb drives say ReadyBoost compatible on them also)
• Windows Vista only allows one device to be used, Windows 7 allows multiple.

That’s all there is to it.  Hope you enjoy your increased performance.