Speed Up Windows Vista

One very cool feature of Windows Vista – especially for machines not natively equipped with the kind of horsepower to fully enjoy the rich visuals of Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) applications is ReadyBoost. ReadyBoost enables you to plug a USB key into your machine and have Windows Vista use it as memory. I hadn’t actually used this myself, but had heard of it long ago. When a reader emailed me asking if this was an urban legend, I decided to check it out for myself and was very impressed with how easy and seamless the process is.
Installing/Configuring the USB Key as Memory
First I took a standard USB 2.0 key (I’ll list the prerequisites shortly) and plugged it into my machine. I’m running Windows Vista Beta 2, Build 5346, but I’m told that this works with the latest CTP made available to beta and TAP members as well as MSDN Subscribers. Upon plugging the USB key into my computer, I was greeted with the standard "AutoPlay" dialog box asking how I wanted to the operating system to treat the USB key. However, with ReadyBoost I get the additional option (circled below in the screen capture) of using the key to "speed up my system".
Once I click the "Speed up my system" option, the Properties dialog box for the device is displayed where I can specify to start/stop ReadyBoost usage of the device and how much space I want used as a memory cache. (Actually, according to one of the Product Specialists here, this space is used more as a flash-based page file than true RAM, but the impact is that the more space you choose here, the more benefit you’ll get in terms of overall system performance.)
(In order to return to this dialog box, open the Computer window, right-click the drive (F: in this case) and select Properties. From there, click the Memory tab (as shown in the previous screen capture and adjust the settings as needed).
For the inquisitive, opening the drive in an Explorer window reveals that ReadyBoost has created a cache file of the specified size.