[Who's Me]

I don't know if this has been posted before but I just found out about it and I am sure a lot of other people have never tried this.
http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/arch...14/576548.aspx
You just plug in a usb flash drive and wait for the pop-up menu, click "speed up my system" you will get a dialog box asking how much memory you want to give to ready boost (I gave it the max) click ok and see how much faster your computer responds.
I run XP but my girlfriend has a HP Pavillion DV6000 with vista and only 1 G/RAM. I plugged in A Cruzer micro 4G ($10) just to try it out and she was so happy she stole it from me.

It does not work with all flash drives for reasons pointed out in the article so maybe if you try it you could post any ones that do work for anyone who needs to go out and buy one.
I used a Cruzer micro 4G.
New Egg has some that say ready boost ready but there are plenty of others that will work.

[Elvandil]

It has been my experience (unconfirmed by any actual testing) that too large a flash drive actually slows down the system. Things seem to be optimal with a 2 GB drive but the machine seems to spend too much time accessing the drive when 4 GB's is used. This is just an impression, however.

eBoostr works much better than ReadyBoost (though both together are even better because they cache differently). With eBoostr, you can use any device for caching, a hard drive, dedicated partition, system memory, or USB devices. And you can use up to 4 devices at once.

[JohnWill]

When you configure ReadyBoost, it actually suggests the amount of the drive you should use, it's best to take the recommendation offered. I connected a 2gig drive and Vista asked for 850mb.

FWIW, after increasing memory to 4gigs, I see no effect with ReadyBoost.

[Elvandil]

Originally Posted by JohnWill

When you configure ReadyBoost, it actually suggests the amount of the drive you should use, it's best to take the recommendation offered. I connected a 2gig drive and Vista asked for 850mb.

FWIW, after increasing memory to 4gigs, I see no effect with ReadyBoost.

Was that drive empty? Mine requested around 1850 if I remember right. It has been my experience that it always requests just below the total available space.

[JohnWill]

I'll have to try it again, I don't have on in the machine right now.

[Kenny94]

Originally Posted by JohnWill

When you configure ReadyBoost, it actually suggests the amount of the drive you should use, it's best to take the recommendation offered. I connected a 2gig drive and Vista asked for 850mb.

FWIW, after increasing memory to 4gigs, I see no effect with ReadyBoost.

Hi John

My understing is anything over 3 Gigs of Ram in Vista 32 bit is a waste? I was told this. Is this true. Also, I've heard with ReadyBoost anything over 2 Gigs of Ram, readyboost was useless?

[JohnWill]

Well, with any 32 bit O/S, the reserved addresses consume most of the last gigabyte of address space, so that extra memory is simply not available at all. I guess you could say it's a waste. However, in order to get dual-channel operation, you have to add memory in pairs, and the pairs I had happened to be 1gig modules.

I don't know about Readyboost, but my personal experience was that the effect was difficult to see.

[Kenny94]

Thanks John! Now I know...

[Who's Me]

Found this Q&A From Matt Ayers,
http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/arch...02/615199.aspx

""Q: Ok... 256M-4GB is a pretty big range... any recommendations?
A: Yes. We recommend a 1:1 ratio of flash to system memory at the low end and as high as 2.5:1 flash to system memory. Higher than that and you won't see much benefit.""

I didn't notice anything about too much being bad but I will turn hers down to 2.5G for her 1G machine just to be sure.

""Q: How much of a speed increase are we talking about?
A: Well, that depends. On average, a RANDOM 4K read from flash is about 10x faster than from HDD. Now, how does that translate to end-user perf? Under memory pressure and heavy disk activity, the system is much more responsive; on a 4GB machine with few applications running, the ReadyBoost effect is much less noticable.""

So Yeah, if you already have a good machine the difference will be negligible but on a laptop with 1G RAM that takes like 5 minutes to start up it seems to make a pretty good good improvement. (Of course it doesn't help the startup time, but once you are in it is more responsive.)

[JohnWill]

Yep, my laptop with 4gigs or the desktop the same doesn't seem to notice the Readyboost.

[Elvandil]

eBoostr will allow you to put that extra RAM to use. You can add a portion of RAM as a cache for it.

[Chol]

I am using my old usb not the one ia m using for school stuff..

Thanks tech guy