Home / server / Questions / 33488
Accepted
lagerdalek
Asked: 2009-06-30 13:24:06 +0800 CST

How useful is ReadyBoost on W7 (or Vista)

  • 772

As a cheap (and temporary, if I can convince the powers that be to buy more RAM), solution to speed up some development laptops, is it worthwhile using ReadyBoost with a few spare SD cards?

I'm worried it will become the 'accepted' workaround, and want to avoid it if is not particularly useful.

EDIT The laptops are currently running with 2GB RAM, and the largest SD cards we have are 4GB

windows-vista memory windows-7 readyboost

4 Answers

  1. If you're referring to ReadyBoost, my roommate says his Vista SP1 laptop got noticeably faster when he formatted a 2GB flash drive for ReadyBoost. Accessing the pagefile off the flash drive was faster than accessing the 7200 rpm hard drive, despite having to use the USB interface layer (which I thought might slow it down).

    • 3
  2. Best Answer

    It depends how much RAM you have on the laptops right now... the less real RAM you have, the more it will make a difference. If you are running with 512MB, you will probably notice a difference. If you have 4GB, you will not. The best way to find out the impact on your specific laptops with your specific SD cards is just to try it.

    Speaking of cheap, however... Crucial has 4GB of Latop DDR2 memory for $44 with free shipping. Real RAM is by far the best thing, and at that price how can you go wrong?

    • 2

  3. I am using 4GB DDR2 Kingston high performance ram @ 1066mhz. The reason why I surf to this article is simply because I don't see any difference after adding a 4GB Kingston pendrive. Activating ReadyBoost took up 3.8 Gb as ReadyBoost Cache Files and honestly, I cant even notice any gains. I am confuse to why ReadyBoost takes up such a big chunk of size.

    I think ReadyBoost is only good for PC/notebooks with 1 or 2 GB rams.

    • 1

  4. This is a old question, and here is a recently related webpage about this question.

    According to my own experience, there is no single answer whether readyboost is useful or useless. You can see whether readyboost can benefit you or not by checking the following things:

    • Do you use computer for a long time, e.g. 8 hours a day continuously?
    • Does the task manager indicated that you used most ram when working?(for me firefox, thunderbird, a 1G Ram VM, some chat app eat up more than 3G RAM, when I only has 4G )
    • Does you experience lost of reponse, switch between application become very slow, HDD light always on, after using the system for a longtime?

    If you are in the above situation, readyboost will help a lot. If not, the readyboost is indeed useless for you.

    • 0