Readyboost?

[bloodslush]

Does anyone know if it actually does anything or is it more of a gimmic?

 

[Assman]

read this

 

[croc]

It chews up a flash drive for all its worth... Took 4 GB of my 8 GB voyager. Did it do any good? Seemed to help with multitasking, but not much. I'd assume that once I chewed up all 2GB physical memory, it might come into play and be a faster swapfile than the HD. I haven't tested that theory yet.

Judging from task manager, nothing changed.

Meh...

 

[choirbass]

it works well enough, but as the article says, its by no means comparable to having more memory...

you can really use any usb 2.0 drive (not just flash based, though the usb 2.0 hdd i used didnt seem to retain the readyboost file after a reboot, the 512MB flash drive did retain it though), and the drives can be really any capacity too i believe... all that matters ive found is that the interface has to be supported... but beyond that, if it says its not fast enough, or large enough, or whatever, all thats needed then is a few registry edits, and then it works

 

[croc]

But did you notice any 'huge' performance increase?

 

[choirbass]

an improvement yes, but a huge one, no, relatively speaking anyhow... the largest improvement i found was in windows login times, and starting internet explorer (considering i did those enough to make a difference lol)... but, if you browse online alot (or anything else), it really can help, at least to alleviate slight annoyances in wait times, whenever they might happen... but for the most part, the things i mentioned did load quicker...

right now its in my brothers system (the flash drive is)... hes running vista rtm on only 512mb ram, lol... so, it definetly helped him there some

 

[croc]

Maybe when I get my upgrade to my laptop it'll make a 'difference'... But on my desktop, I don't see much if any. I'll patiently wait and see.

 

[choirbass]

yeah, the flash drive i have didnt cost me anything, just thought i might try it since it was there to use (had to google for the registry part though). but, if anyone just has one laying around unused, it certainly wont hurt their load times any, quite the opposite... and its a free performance boost in that case, however small it might seem, especially if its something you do a lot. cant complain there.

key words are cheap/free and unused/or doesnt have much better use otherwise

 

[croc]

Free is a good point... My laptop only has a GB ram, and is sharing some with vid. So a 'free' 512 GB from a rep could be useful. As I said, I'll patiently wait and see.

 

[choirbass]

okay, cool