Hands on: Speed up with Readyboost

Microsoft recommends matching the Readyboost capacity to the amount of system Ram, so if you have 1GB of Ram, go for a 1GB device and assign it all to Vista.

Microsoft claims there can be benefits with up to 2.5 times more flash memory than Ram, up to a limit of 4GB – a restriction of the Fat32 file system.

For now, though, you can only use one Flash device at a time for Readyboost.

Normally in the Hardware and Performance features we’d use fresh Windows installations for benchmarking, but since Readyboost is designed to give a shot in the arm to existing systems, I thought I’d try it on my own office PC. To match its 2GB of system Ram, I got hold of a Crucial 2GB Gizmo Overdrive USB key, which at the time of writing cost £14 from www.crucial.com/uk.

To test its impact, I timed how long it took to boot Vista along with starting several applications, first without the key, then with the key configured to devote 1GB, then its full 2GB capacity to Readyboost.

Readyboost results
The presence of a Readyboost-configured key didn’t make any difference to my startup times and, strangely, it appeared to slow the initial startup times of my applications. Launching Outlook 2007 with a 120MB PST file took five seconds without Readyboost, six seconds with Readyboost configured to 1GB and eight seconds with 2GB. Photoshop CS2 took 5.7, 6.7 and nine seconds for the same configurations, respectively.

Closing the applications and restarting them straight away saw all the configurations speed up, but all to virtually the same time. So Outlook restarted in 2.8 seconds and Photoshop in 5.1 seconds, regardless of the presence of Readyboost.

I’d half expected a result like this after reading Microsoft’s comments about Readyboost being ideal to accelerate systems with ‘only’ 512MB or 1GB or Ram. Perhaps PCs with 2GB of Ram are beyond its help.

In next month’s column I’ll give Readyboost a further workout with alternative keys and also in systems equipped with less Ram. In the meantime I’d love to hear from anyone who’s using Readyboost and how they’ve found it in practice.