What is Readyboost ?

Readyboost is a component in Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows 7 which helps to configure a USB 2.0 flash drive, SD Card, Compact Flash or similar kind of USB drives to store system cache.

One way to improve your system performance is to add more system memory (RAM). But it is costly and in some Motherboards only 2 RAM slots will be available and if both are full then you can only replace the existing ones plus you need a hardware engineer’s help.

Even though Readyboost cannot guarantee same performance of a system SD/DDR RAM it can significantly improve your system performance especially if your system memory is too small.

To configure Readyboost you need a USB 2.0 compatible flash drive or minimum 256MB with a reading speed of 2.5MB/s and writing speed of 1.75MB/s.

In Windows Vista 32 bit the maximum capacity is limited to 3.5GB and in 64 bit version it is 16GB.

Windows 7 supports up to 8 Readyboost devices and a maximum of 256GB.

How to configure Readyboost ?

To configure Readyboost just insert your Pen drive/flash drive, right click on it and go to properties. Now click on the readyboost tab. It will show 3 options – Do no use this device, Dedicate this device to readyboost and Use this device.

If your flash drive is formatted to FAT32 then Windows will show you only 4GB as available space to readyboost due to file system limitations. If your drive is more that 4GB and want to configure for full space then reformat your drive to NTFS.

Some old flash drives may not meet Windows minimum requirements so Windows will display an error message saying that it cannot be configured for Readyboost.

Just select your required limit and click on Apply button to start using Readyboost.

Performance

If your system has enough system memory like 4GB then you may not see any significant improvement in overall working but Readyboost will show major improvement in system performance if your system memory is too small like 1GB or 512KB.