Article By:  Miguel

Article Date:  03/29/07

  Windows Vista has certainly gotten its fair share of criticism since its official release, and with good reason.  After playing with Vista for so long now, I remain quite frustrated, even after fiddling around with the final retail release.  There's just too many issues many will have to face and somewhat force them to take the time to research in order to work them out and keep them sane!  I've found that unless your an avid computer user, you won't be able to figure out how to remedy many of the issues you will face with both hardware and software.  However, that's not the purpose of this article.  Despite its flaws, Vista does incorporate a number of very useful features that many may not even be aware of.  One of these features happens to be ReadyBoost, which will be covered in detail in this short article, including my personal thoughts on what an impact it may have with flash drive manufacturers.

What exactly is ReadyBoost?

Before I get to the details of this new feature, I would like to say that it is personally the one feature this expensive OS has to offer that happens to be designed with the budget user in mind.  I know, that sounds a bit strange, but hey, if you look at the broad picture, eventually many will give in or be somewhat forced to run Vista sooner or later and this feature will finally give in and be taken advantage of.  That's the whole purpose of this article in the first place.  It is a somewhat early look at what the feature is really capable of.

ReadyBoost is basically a somewhat easier way of adding much needed memory to your new Vista PC without the need to purchase additional expensive memory modules or have to resort to installing them in your system yourself.  The feature, in my opinion, will generally appeal more to novice users who may be somewhat weary about opening up their PC and attempt a simple memory module install.  Without getting too technical, what it basically does is use a compatible USB 2.0 flash drive as cache in order to enhance performance and speed up virtual memory usage.  It will also compensate for slow hard drive performance. 

SuperFetch & ReadyBoost - Match made in heaven?

In order for me to provide further details on how this feature will benefit many, we will have to look at another main feature in Vista called SuperFetch.  For those unfamiliar with this feature, SuperFetch will basically monitor which programs you use the most and automatically load them in your system's memory so that it will launch them faster and increase overall performance.  However, if your Vista system is somewhat lacking in the memory department, this feature won't work very well for you and that's where ReadyBoost comes in.  With the additional cache memory it allocates from your flash drive, it will have an impact on application load times and system boot times.

Hardware Requirements

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Must you have a USB flash drive in order to take advantage of this feature?  The answer to that is no and many actually do not know this.  It could actually be any non-volatile memory, meaning any storage card that is able to retain data when not powered such as a Compact Flash or SD Card.  However, it is USB flash drives that most will use to take advantage of this feature because any other flash card will require a reader, some of which honestly are quite unreliable.  It is simply not as convenient as a USB flash drive is and therefore all tests here were conducted using a high performance, high capacity flash drive.

Also important to note is that not every flash drive will work!  Upon inserting a flash drive, Windows Vista will automatically check performance to see if it can be used with this feature.  So what are the requirements?  Let's take a look...

There's a lot of misleading information out there on its requirements and many actually have posted incorrect data on just what hardware is supported.  Just remember, it is a combination of both speed and capacity. 

Next: Setup & Performance