It used to be that the simplest way to boost system performance was to pop open your PC’s case and fit more RAM. Windows Vista contains a new feature that allows you to give your system a performance boost by doing nothing more that plugging a flash USB drive (known sometimes as a USB key) into an available post.

This new technology is called ReadyBoost and this allows users to plug a USB flash memory device into a USB 2.0 port on the PC and use it as a cache or virtual memory. The advantage of ReadyBoost is that it is much faster to cache to the USB drive than caching to your hard disk, speeding up your system and enhancing overall performance. ReadyBoost uses the USB flash memory device as a fast store for frequently accessed data, the average random 4K read from a flash device is about ten times faster than accessing the same information from the hard drive.

To make use of ReadyBoost you’ll need:

• Windows Vista
• PC with a free USB 2.0 port
• A USB flash device which is:
  - Between 250MB and 4GB in size
  - The device must be capable of 2.5MB/sec throughput for 4K random reads and 1.75MB/sec for random writes

It’s important to note that not all flash devices will work with ReadyBoost. First off, the device must be capable of 2.5MB/sec throughput for 4K random reads and 1.75MB/sec for random writes. A device may be marketed as 12MB/sec or x133 speed but beware this could be a measure of of the device’s sequential read performance instead of random read performance. Also, I’ve seen plenty of USB flash drives that contain flash memory chips that aren’t all the same speed. These are useless for ReadyBoost.

Since ReadyBoost uses USB flash drives as a cache, many people fear that this is a security risk. Fortunately, Microsoft has taken care of this. Microsoft use AES-128 to encrypt all data that’s written to the cache, so the chances of any data leakage is negligible.

So, here’s how to use ReadyBoost to make your PC faster:

1. Plug the drive into a free USB 2.0 port
2. Fire up Windows Explorer and find the drive
3. Right click and select Properties
5. 
6. Click on the ReadyBoost tab
   
   
7. Select Use this device. Here you can also set how much space ReadyBoost should reserve for the cache - the most space you reserve, the faster things go.

5. 1. 
6. Click OK.

That’s all there is to it.

Disabling ReadyBoost is just as easy.

There are two ways that you can disable ReadyBoost. First, you can just disconnect the drive from the system. This won’t cause any system instabilities or data loss because the flash drive is not used as an exclusive data store, only as a high-speed cache, so the only thing you’ll notice if you remove the drive is a drop in performance. (The only drawback to this is that the ReadyBoost cache file will remain on the drive and take up storage space until you deleted it manually.)

The best way to disable ReadyBoost is to shut it down properly.

1. Fire up Windows Explorer and find the drive
2. Right click and select Properties
3. Click on the ReadyBoost tab
4. Select Do not use this device.
5. Click OK.

This deletes the cache file for you, once again freeing up space on your flash drive.

How much of an effect you see when using ReadyBoost depends on how much your system is struggling in the first place. The more RAM you have installed the less you’ll need to bother with ReadyBoost, but even with 4GB of RAM I still see a difference when running multiple Office apps with large documents open or doing heavy Photoshop work. If you have a PC with 512MB of RAM then you’re likely to see a great deal of improvement.

The users who are really going to benefit from ReadyBoost are notebook users who want to boost the speed of their systems - a 2GB USB drive could give you 1GB of storage and 1GB for use as a ReadyBoost cache.

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