Windows ReadyBoost- Interesting concept

[GhostGT]

I popped in my USB flash drive today to upload some songs for my friends downstairs and saw an option: "Speed up my system using Windows ReadyBoost."

Apparently you can go ahead and use your USB flash drive as actual RAM on your computer. If you need a quick boost for a game or just don't really feel like upgrading the RAM on your computer, this seems like a cool little thing to do.

That said, I'm gonna try it for the first time right now. I'm not expecting any performance gains since my system isn't really in NEED of a ram boost.

Has anyone used this before? Any opinions? Pros/cons? I'm looking forward to hearing from you all.

Cheers,

Chris

 

[borat_sagdiyev]

good in concept, terrible in execution

gives you a slight performance boost if you have 512mb or 1gb of ram....

and the USB transfer speed limits it alot.

 

[worshipme]

Yes, the bandwidth of the USB connection really limits it's usefulness.

 

[aowen416]

It's pretty useless.

RAM is so incredibly cheap, that if you need the extra speed you can easily finance it. Tom's hardware bought 8gigs for $200.

 

[Verbatim47]

Actually not, i have used it in a old dell with 512mb ram and then i added a 2gb flash drive for more ram and it happened to speed it up quite gloriously... Yes it is true that ram is so inexpensive but i really guess the concept was for older machines... such as DDR (look at sig) probably just one of those extra features that they included to make vista that much more interesting....

But for machines like all of yours and your fancy core 2's lol! and nice rams.. you really wont see that big of an improvement.. I just thought i might shove what I think about it.

 

[JogaBonito1502]

Oh that's pretty cool. But I don't understand how will a flash drive serve as RAM?

 

[Juice1]

It's stupid. Ram is 20 dollars for a gig. And it is faster and more satisfying. Readyboost = paging file...