Ready Boost is another great feature of Vista. What is Ready boost? When there is not enough RAM in your system or when the processor had to do some intense process then a portion of our hard drive is used to temporarily store the instructions to be executed. This is called Virtual memory. Vista can use a portion of your hard drive as Virtual memory. It can also use an USB flash memory card or an SD card as “Virtual memory”. This is called Ready Boost. Ready Boost supports 256 to 4 GB of flash memory devices. The larger the size of the Flash card the greater the speed. What is the advantage of using a Flash memory device as Virtual memory? When a portion of hard disc is used as virtual memory it takes some time to read and write data from the hard drive. But when a flash memory device is used, it offers faster read and write speed. This can considerably increase the performance of our computer.
To activate Ready Boost do the following:
1. Insert a Flash memory device into the USB drive.
2. Right-click on the device and select Properties.
3. Now select the Ready Boost tab and adjust the slider to set the space in the drive to be used as Virtual memory.
Note: Even if you remove the drive in the middle there is no problem because the data loaded in the flash drive is also written to the hard drive’s virtual memory space as a back-up.
So don’t worry about memory constrains with Vista because if you feel that your system is slow or short of RAM, just insert your flash memory card into the USB drive.
