Your PC can get to data in RAM hundreds of times faster than it can fetch something from the Hard-Drive. If you are like me and have open at least 10 different application at the same time, plus playing around with 2 or 3 virtual machine, which, by the way, consume lots of memory space; also, all the usual application running in the background, your memory will run out pretty fast, and your PC will start to drag pretty soon. So Vista has a little tool called “ReadyBoost” that pretty much lets you use a USB Flash Drive as additional memory. Well, You might be wondering; what happens if someone pulls out the drive and tries to snoop out your data; well, don’t worry Vista encrypts the data on the Flash Drive.

To take advantage of this speed-boosting feature, just plug a USB flash drive into your computer. Both your computer and the flash drive must have USB 2.0 or later. USB 1.1 is too slow for this trick to work. In any case the AutoPlay dialog box now opens, click “Speed up my system.” If AutoPlay will not open you can go to the flash drive property box, by right clicking on the flash drive and click properties and go to RadyBoost

In my case, I used a 2 GB SanDisk but not all drives work with ReadyBoost. Look closely at the drive’s packaging to see if there’s a Vista ReadyBoost logo. Also, ReadyBoost works with drives capacity from 256 to 4 GB. Once you plugged in the device Vista will make suggestions to how much space in the drive should be use for ReadyBoost. The biggest speed gains appear when you have a 1-to-1 ratio between the PC and the memory on you flash drive; for example, if you have 2 G of physical memory, you will get maximum speed if you use only about 2 G of your flash drive. Once you use your flash drive for ReadyBoost, you can not store data in the drive.