Boost Performance With Ready Boost

Windows Vista has a great number of new features which are designed to help your older computer run Windows Vista more smoothly and create a better performance and experience for you. One of these features is a tweak called ReadyBoost. What ReadyBoost does is help your computer by giving it more memory in order to process the high demanding applications you need to run. If your computer is a bit low on RAM, it must kick applications out of high-speed physical memory to the paging file on your hard drive. This means you’ll take a big hit in performance and increased activity on your hard drive, which may slow your production down to a halt.

ReadyBoost is designed to help this situation by giving Windows an alternative to sticking your applications into the slow paging file on your hard drive. What ReadyBoost does is utilizes USB storage devices, which are faster than a hard disk. This results in a performance boost because Windows is using a high speed alternative instead of the slower paging file on your hard drive.

You’ll need a USB Storage Device which meets the minimum performance and space requirements for using ReadyBoost. These requirements are as follows:

If you’re unsure that your USB storage device meets these requirements, you should try it just in case. Many USB storage devices produced within the last year or so meet and exceed these requirements. To get started using your device with ReadyBoost, you should follow these simple steps:

1. Plug in your USB storage device.
2. Go to ‘Computer’ and right click on Removable Storage Device. Then click Properties.
3. If your device is a compatiable device, you’ll see a ReadyBoost tab. If it is not, you’ll need to find another device in order to use ReadyBoost. If your device is ReadyBoost compatiable, click on the ReadyBoost tab and select ‘Use this device’.
4. Select the amount of space you want to allocate to your system to be used by ReadyBoost.
5. Click ‘Okay’ and you’re finished.

You should now have a bit more memory available to your processes and your machine should seem a bit faster, depending on the amount of space you allocated to memory usage.