Windows Vista – Setting up ReadyBoost

ReadyBoost is a feature in Windows Vista that allows you to use a USB Thumb Drive (Or a Pen Drive, whatever you crazy kids call it these days) as extra RAM for your computer. If your computer runs slowly and you don’t have any extra RAM slots on your Motherboard (Or you simply don’t want to open up your computer case) then this can be handy to help speed things up a bit. For this example, i’m using a Kingston 1GB Thumb Drive that cost me about a Fiver.

First of all, plug it in to a USB port on your computer, after your computer is finished installing the drivers for the device you’ll be prompted with this:

Assuming the box appears, click on “Speed up my system”. If for some reason you’re not, go to My Computer, right-click the USB Drive and click on Properties. Click on the ReadyBoost tab. Either way, you should have a box similar to this now:

Click on the “Use this device” option to use the device as extra RAM. If you want to add an extra gigabyte of RAM, then you should enter 1024 in the box (There are 1024MB in 1GB). If you want 2GB of extra RAM then type in 2048. Of course, this all depends on the capacity of your thumb drive.

I didn’t notice much of a performance boost but then my system is fairly high-spec anyway and I was just letting you guys know about this feature. Hopefully this’ll be useful to people who have slow systems running Vista.

~ by pokeh on November 20, 2008.