Readyboost: Windows Vista Ready Flash Drive

[Katalya]

I searched and couldn't find if this was already discussed. And I have a couple of questions for those techies out there.

To my understanding Windows Vista enables to use flash drives that are vista ready to be used as extra memory like RAM up to the amount of space that is on the drive. (512, 1.0 2.0 and so on)

Do you have to use all your RAM expansion slots before you can take advantage of this?

Can you use more than one flash drive, as many usb ports as you have available?

From what I have read and gathered, it isn't as fast as RAM but it will get the job done. And if someone asked about the specs of your computer, would you also add the amount of Readyboost in with your RAM?

What is everyone's opinion, for those that actually like vista. I don't want to hear opinions like XP > Vista.

Thanks

[Devek]

Just imagine that this doesn't exist. This was just bullshit to make people think Vista somehow does something XP doesn't.

When your computer runs out of memory it takes parts of memory that it thinks is not being used and copies them to disk and frees up that memory to be used for something else.

The amazing part about this is that it uses a flash drive instead of the disk on your computer.. You could go into XP too and set up a swap partition on your usb flash drive but you wouldn't because that would be retarded.. you would just go out and buy more ram for your computer and use that USB stick for something useful like storing files.

USB memory isn't really any faster than your disk but it has a lot lower seek time so in theory it would be better than using your disk as swap but performance except your operating system shouldn't ever be swapping something out frequently enough that lower seek time would be noticeable..

If you have enough memory in your computer you will not (or at least should not) notice a difference between having ready boost or not.

If you don't have enough memory in your computer you would get better performance running windows 2000 instead of Vista with ready boost.

[Ichthyos]

To my understanding Windows Vista enables to use flash drives that are vista ready to be used as extra memory like RAM up to the amount of space that is on the drive. (512, 1.0 2.0 and so on)

That's the idea, more or less. It uses the space as a fast cache, since flash drives have RAM-like access time. So for many small reads, flash drives are faster than hard drives, but hard drives of course win out for sustained transfer from contiguous data.

Do you have to use all your RAM expansion slots before you can take advantage of this?

Nope.

Can you use more than one flash drive, as many usb ports as you have available?

I think as of right now you can only use one flash drive.

From what I have read and gathered, it isn't as fast as RAM but it will get the job done.

Right. Under no circumstance would you purchase a flash drive (for ReadyBoost) instead of buying more RAM, when trying to speed up your system. ReadyBoost is something that you can use if you just have extra flash drives sitting around that are rated pretty fast.

And if someone asked about the specs of your computer, would you also add the amount of Readyboost in with your RAM?

No, but you might mention it.