Windows Vista includes a new feature called ReadyBoost that allows you to use a USB key as virtual memory in order to enhance performance. Most of the new desktop today comes with a lot of RAM and also a standard 7200RPM hard drive and you wouldn’t really see any speed improvements after enabling ReadyBoost. However for laptops, the laptop memory are being priced relatively higher than the for desktop systems and many laptops are still using the slow 4200RPM or 5200RPM hard drives. I’ve also read that ReadyBoost can increase laptop battery life by reducing hard drive access, allowing the hard drive to spin down.

To speed up Vista system using ReadyBoost, all you need to do is to plug in your USB flash drive that is ReadyBoost capable, select “Speed up my system using Windows ReadyBoost” from the autoplay window and you’re all set. You can then go to the drive’s properties where a ReadyBoost tab will be made available for you to configure the available space to use for ReadyBoost. Matt Ayers, who is the Program Manager in the Microsoft Windows Client Performance group and basically owns the ReadyBoost feature recommends a 1:1 ratio of flash to system memory at the low end and as high as 2.5:1 flash to system memory. Higher than that and you won’t see much benefit.

After enabling ReadyBoost, all we see is the LED light at USB flash drive blinking all the time and how do you know if it is working or not? Well here are 2 tools that you can use to monitor the read and write cache which gives you an idea of how well ReadyBoost is working.


The first one that I found was ReadyBoost Monitor by Area 71.

It is only a 56KB free portable tool that you can use to monitor the ReadyBoost read and write speed, the cache and compressed size. This tool can be minimized to the notification area (system tray) and moving your mouse cursor over the icon will conveniently show you a popup on the current read and write speed. It also has a nice small graph to show you the activity of the ReadyBoost.

[ Download ReadyBoost Monitor ]

The second one is also called ReadyBoost Monitor and it is created by the developers of popular “The Cleaner”.

About 10 years ago when antivirus could only detect virus but not trojans, The Cleaner was very popular and is the only tool that could detect and clean trojans. Their free ReadyBoost monitoring tool is able to show ReadyBoost Hits, ReadyBoost Reads, Physical disk and the efficiency in percentage. This tool is free, portable, only 24KB and they even provide the complete source code for the ReadyBoost Monitor.

[ Download ReadyBoost Monitor by MooSoft ]

After enabling ReadyBoost on my laptop running Vista Business for about 10 minutes, I could already feel that the USB flash drive is getting pretty hot and thought that this could shorten the life span of my pen drive. Microsoft is aware of the lifecycle issues with flash drives and are smart about how and when they do their writes to the device. According to Microsoft, the drive should be able to operate for at least ten years. I guess I will be using ReadyBoost from today onwards until I add in another 2GB DDR3 RAM.

If you have any questions regarding ReadyBoost or to know more about it, please read the Q&A interview with Matt Ayers.