Ready Boost for XP and Vista

[Weave]

XP and Vista have a way of speeding up using a flash drive - when you plug it in it gives you the option of using the drive to speed up your computer. Nice. it writes to the flash drive rather than the hard drive swap file (about 10 times faster!).

Just got a 2 gb flash drive from Walmart fo $13 (Impact is the no-name brand) and it does seem quicker. At least on my Vista laptop.

[Weave]

Sorry - Ready Boost might only work for Vista.

[digiSal]

need to give that a try. Rob has one of my extra usb sticks.

hey thats funny. as i was typing this reply and when i hit Post it gave me a warning that a new reply had been posted while i was typing.

anyway, i know i have heard about it in vista but i thought you had found an Xp version out there. which i am sure there is.

[Weave]

I saw a few things about using a USB drive to put a swap file on - not the same thing, really, but interesting.

I tried to do that a million years ago on a 486 laptop running Win 95 and 16 megs of memory - had a PCMCIA Compact Flash reader and I put my 32 meg card in there and popped the settings to swap to it. Didn't do much good at that time - maybe the card was slow or whatever. It was fun to give it a shot, though.

[Weave]

ReadyBoost for XP gives instructions on how to move a swap file over to a flash drive - still not the same as Ready Boost. Not sure if you'd gain much performance this way.

At the bottom of the page in the comments there is a link to something called eboostr - they have a trial version that allows you to use it for the first two hours after booting and then it disables. No idea how well it works. The product is sold in British Pounds and with the exchange rate and the like it would probably just be cheaper to buy ram.

[digiSal]

What i used to do, and i think you mentioned it above was move the Swap file to a different partition. I never noticed that much a difference but does this Ready Boost fro Vista make that much of a difference? Have you ran it with and without the stick?

[Weave]

crap seems much faster with Ready Boost - I have Vista Basic and a gig of memory on a 1.7 ghz laptop with a 5000 something rpm hd. I use open office on this thing and it usually takes a little while to open - much faster now. Maybe it is a placebo effect, but it sure does seem faster to me.

When you insert a Flash Drive Vista speed tests, and then if the stick is fast enough it will offer to "Speed up Windows". If you click yes it pops up a slider that asks how much memory you want to use. I chose all of it myself. Apply, and there you are. Not sure if it will keep asking you if you keep the stick there. Might be interesting on desktop systems - plug, set, and forget.

I did read that Ready Boost can only handle a 4 gig drive or lower, and not all drives will work (has to be fast enough).

I will definately experiment some more later.