Microsoft’s newest operating system, Windows Vista, comes with a neat feature called ReadyBoost.  ReadyBoost provides a cheap alternative for increasing your system’s “memory” and ultimately your system’s performance.  The best part is that you may have everything you need already laying around your office or home.

How it works:  for many years now, the Microsoft operating systems have utilized a dedicated portion of your hard drives for what it calls paging files.  The paging files act as a storage repository for commonly & recently accessed files.  This allows them to be accessed without having to scan across an entire hard drive, resulting in faster access rates and higher system performance.

Nowadays, the cost of flash storage devices (i.e. USB Keys, SD memory cards, etc.) has dropped dramatically in price.  While flash devices typically don’t provide the capacity of your normal hard drives, they do provide a much faster access rate --- generally around 10 times faster.  ReadyBoost takes advantage of this increased speed and allows you to utilize flash devices as an intermediary between your system memory (RAM) and the hard drives.  ReadyBoost will allocate capacity on your flash device and will use this as additional paging space for the operating system.

In turn, you are upgrading your system’s “memory” with low cost, high-speed USB keys or camera cards that you probably have lying around.  Even if you don’t… you can usually find a 1 or 2 GB USB key for less than $25 at your local PC store.

How to enable ReadyBoost:  when you insert a USB key or other flash memory into Windows Vista, you are typically prompted with an AutoPlay dialogue.  From the AutoPlay prompt, you can select “Speed up my system using Windows ReadyBoost.”  In the ReadyBoost properties tab, select “Use this device,” set the capacity you want to reserve for its use, and click OK.  I recommend letting ReadyBoost have the full capacity, as it is easier to set & forget.

How to disable ReadyBoost:  you can right-click on the drive letter assigned to your flash drive (in Windows Explorer) and select properties.  Within the drive properties, you will see the same ReadyBoost tab that was used to enable this function.  Simply select “Do not use this device” and click OK.