This post is about one of the most overlooked, yet one of the most welcomed, additions to Windows Vista: ReadyBoost. Now Veterans of the operating system (those who have been following it through the beta versions will already know about this, but they won’t be reading this blog anyway).

ReadyBoost is the best way available to improve the performance of your computer without actually adding more RAM to it. It makes use of any flash memory (USB Flash Drive, a Flash Card, your iPod, etc.) to “boost” the performance of your computer. It utilizes this flash device as a memory cache for accessing data on the hard drive. And without getting into too much detail, we assure you that this can really speed  up the performance of your computer.

How to make it work?

As soon as you insert a USB drive into your USB port, the AutoPlay dialogue pops up. This dialogue in Vista gives you an extra option as shown in the picture below:

As can be seen, the new option is “Speed up my system”. If you select this option Vista starts using the USB device as a memory cache.

Typically a flash memory is 80-100 times faster than the hard drive in read performance, and so this speeds up the access to the cached data, hence improving overall performance of the Operating System.

Note: some applications even depend on the presence of the ReadyBoost service and will not work properly without this service enabled, so do not turn off the service even if you don’t plan on using this by adding a Flash device.

Another way to enable ReadyBoost (in case you have AutoPlay off) is to access it from the properties of the Flash device. When you open the properties of the Flash Drive, you see a tab for ReadyBoost (see picture below):

As you can see, this also allows you to turn on ReadyBoost on the device. This also allows you to specify how much of the available space on the USB device do you want to use for ReadyBoost purposes.

This is also the place where you can turn off the ReadyBoost in case you turned it on earlier and now need your USB space.

Note: It is worth mentioning that ReadyBoost is probably even more beneficial to Laptop users than Desktop users for many reasons. First of all is the fact that laptops usually have smaller RAMs and slower hardware as compared to the desktops. This alone causes slower Vista performance. Other factors are that the laptop hard drives are usually slower than desktop hard drives (4800 rpm or 5400 rpm compared to 7200 rpm and above). Yet another factor is that if the hard drive is accessed less frequently (as it would be in case of ReadyBoost) it can power down and increase battery life of the laptop.

Well, that concludes a quick and crisp introduction to this very useful feature of Windows Vista. Let us know in comments how much imrovement you saw when employing ReadyBoost.