Week 5 with Vista RTM - Update

Time does go by fast when you are having fun. Well it’s week #5 using Vista and I gave what is called Ready Boost a try. I have a 2GB flash memory stick that I used for testing purposes. The system I am using Vista with already has 1 GB of fixed RAM. But I am using a memory monitoring program and I have noticed after boot I only have about 450MB available. I blame Windows OneCare for taking one heck of a lot of resources. If I uninstall this software, I end up with 650MB available! But that’sanother story.

So what is Ready Boost?

Ready Boost is a new feature in Windows Vista that lets a users use a removable flash memory device, such as a USB thumb drive, to improve system performance without opening the computer case. Windows Ready Boost helps in improving system performance because it can retrieve data kept on the flash memory more quickly. So instead of getting data from the hard disk which is slow, the data comes from the thumb drive which uses flash memory.

How do you use Ready Boost?

It’simple. Plug in the USB thumb drive and a auto play window comes up and you just select “Speed up my system using ReadyBoost.” That’s it. And I immediately noticed a performance boost when I started using my spread sheets programs that I transfered over to Vista. So it does work!

Conclusion - I think that Ready Boost is going to be a easy way to increase performance on a Vista system without having to crack open the case and adding more physical RAM. It will also eliminate the problem of RAM you ordered not be the correct type for your system or when there is a RAM limit on some machines.
[tags]windows vista, ready boost, increase performance, easy, simple,[/tags]