By using these techniques Microsoft allow you to use your Flash drive to it's fullest.
There is however a downside to this boost in performance, the increased IO on the Flash drive cause it's lifetime before failure to be shorter as all Flash drives have a limited number of writes before they fail. This is not really an issue though with the price of the devices, and the technology gets better every day.
There are other ways to use the ReadyBoost feature besides USB drives. Most flash memory can be used if it has the performance required, making laptops with SD card readers ideal for the feature. Manufacturers of hard disk drives are also getting in on the act, with a number of them announcing 4GB flash drives integrated into 2.5" and 3.5" hard disk drives.
To test the performance benefits of ReadyBoost I decided to run some benchmarks. I decided on using OpenSourceMark as it will give the whole of the operating system a run through.
As you can see from the figures to the left, ReadyBoost does make a difference, even on a laptop with 2GB of ram.
I also did some "general feel" tests on my wife's laptop. It currently limps along with only 512Mb of ram, and the difference to the overall performance is quite staggering. Boot times decreased (although not as much as I hoped), but the real noticeable improvement was in resuming from standby, where even on my 2GB laptop the time to resume was reduced from 5 seconds to sub 2 with the login screen responding immediately, instead of taking a few seconds to become responsive to keyboard and mouse input.
Office 2007 showed a noticeable increase in responsiveness and lower launch time for all the applications, and Internet Explorer was dramatically quicker at reloading previously visited pages and sites that used the shared code throughout (banners and stylesheets etc).
Running on my laptop with 2GB of ram the difference was not quite as noticeable. The figures from the benchmarks show that it IS performing better, but not by enough to make any real difference.
Article comments
1 - Sandesh Sadhale
A few days back I bought the Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 4GB edition, hoping it will give a readyboost to my windows vista. But when I plug in the device, vista carries out a test and shows that the device DOES NOT have the characteristics required for readyboost :-( dont know why! I am bit disappointed at this as I was expecting readyboost to help me speed up my system.
2 - JohnL
It works great on a XP system. There are NO DRIVERS for Vista. If you have Vista don't bother.
3 - Zbigniew Michalak (Mitch)
I got my self 'mini cruzer 2GB' and it works perfect with my desk top PC on windows XP but now I bought lap top with Vista Windows and it doesn't work at all so what's the trick if any one knows? I looked for drivers all over the internet and couldn't find one, does that mean I can't use my cruzer on my lap top? WASTED MONEY IN'T IT?
4 - Scooter
Just called SanDisk support. A patch to the Cruzer Micro 4GB is being released 'before the end of 2007' that will allow the Cruzer to work with Vista. As others have posted, mine worked fine on an XP laptop and doesn't do doodly a Vista laptop. Hopefully cured in a few weeks.
5 - Brian
In Vista, go into the equivalent of
My Computer and look at your flash drive. Right click on that drive and go to Properties. There is a tab entitled ReadyBoost. Go to this tab, and select Use this device for ReadyBoost. Done!
6 - Divez
for me, its not working! I have Sandisk cruzer micro 1.0GB and nothing´s working! help!
7 - Mike C
This works
C:windowsinfINFCACHE.1 is most likely corrupt and should be deleted.
You will need to edit its file permissions to give Full Control to the
User Group before you will be allowed to delete it.
8 - Azkeyz
This buggered me for a while about what exactly is going on , with sandisk micro cruiser 2g U3 on vista , mine was not working on other USB my extended USB ports , but when I move this little jewl to primary USB port headers , vuala everything returned to normal.
hope that helps some people
May the nforce2 be with you , always.
9 - makki
i have uninstall the u3 software but can not restore the u3 software