Ranking at number 9 in Microsoft’s own Top Ten Tips & Tricks, ReadyBoost is on first sight an interesting way to speed up your Vista PC’s performance without buying more RAM:
Windows Vista introduces a new concept for adding additional performance to a running system. Windows ReadyBoost™ lets people use flash memory on a USB 2.0 drive, SD Card, Compact Flash, or other memory form factor to provide additional memory cache—memory that the computer can access much more quickly than it can access data on the hard drive. Insert a USB 2.0 memory drive with at least 512 MB capacity. When prompted, click use this device to speed up my computer.
Microsoft is clearly keen to talk ReadyBoost up as an innovation. Like Paul Thurrott, though, we were left wondering about a couple of things. For example: what is the net gain in performance when using a 1GB thumbdrive as cache rather than your traditional hard-disk which might well have in excess of 100GB free space? Isn’t this just a fancy name for moving the pagefile to a USB device? Matt Ayers responds succinctly in this useful Q&A session:
Hard drives are great for large sequential I/O. For those situations, ReadyBoost gets out of the way. We concentrate on improving the performance of small, random I/Os, like paging to and from disk.
He also makes the point that ReadyBoost isn’t just an alternative pagefile. Vista uses the traditional pagefile on your hard-disk just as XP did before it. What ReadyBoost most resembles is cache: your computer will check your thumbdrive for data before falling back to the hard-disk.
But the big problem we have with ReadyBoost is that it seems to be recommended most to users with low-end systems, typically with less than 1GB of RAM. At the same time, we’re well aware that while technically compatible with 512MB machines, those of you who really want to enjoy Vista will need at least 1GB of memory on hand. While it’s undoubtedly the case that a small subset of Windows users will have to upgrade to Vista and won’t be able to upgrade their hardware at the same time, ReadyBoost feels like a bit of a work-around rather than a fix. It’s also worth considering that some users are reporting stability issues while using this feature.
Our tip is: if your current configuration only packs 512MB of RAM, you’re going to need to upgrade pretty soon. We reckon that you’re best off waiting until you buy or build your new system with at least 2GB of memory before you bother upgrading your OS. ReadyBoost makes Windows Vista on a 512MB system feasible but nowhere near as fun as Windows Vista on a 2GB machine.
