 Using Windows ReadyBoost to Increase Performance in Vista |
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 Jan 13 2007, 09:04 PM
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A brief excerpt of the tutorial can be found here: Have you ever had an experience where you are using a lot of programs in Windows, or a really memory intensive one, and notice that your hard drive activity light is going nuts, there is lots of noise from the hard drive, and your computer is crawling? This is called disk thrashing and it is when you have run out of physical RAM and instead Windows is using a file on your hard drive to act as a virtual memory. Since writing and reading to a hard drive is much slower than reading from physical RAM, your computer's performance takes a huge hit. In the past the only way to avoid this type of issue is to either run less programs at the same time or buy more memory and install it. The problem is that in our multitasking lives, running one program at a time just won't cut it and memory can be expensive and difficult to install for the average user, though we do have a great tutorial on this process. Microsoft and its partners, though, have come up with a very simple and elegant solution called Windows ReadyBoost. Windows ReadyBoost allows Vista to use compatible USB flash drives as cache instead of the hard drive. This is faster because it has been shown that small random reads and writes on flash RAM can be 8-10 times faster than caching them to one of your hard drives. In order to really benefit from this new feature, Microsoft suggests that you provide enough space on a flash drive for ReadyBoost so that you are in at least a 1:1 ratio with your installed physical RAM. You will also need to use flash drives that meet the following specifications: At least 1GB of storage capacity The flash device must have at least 512MB free 5 MB/sec throughput for random 4k reads across the entire device 3 MB/sec throughput for random 512k writes across the entire device In order to make it easier for you to find flash drives that support Windows ReadyBoost, look for the words Enhanced for ReadyBoost or something similar printed on the packaging of the flash drive itself. An example of this is shown on the picture of the SanDisk Cruzer 2 GB flash drive that I am using during this tutorial, below. We hope you find this tutorial helpful. The Bleeping Computer Staff |
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