Vista Ready Boost Bargain

[PaulBT]

For those of you using Vista, you might be interested to know that Tesco's are selling a Ready Boost ready USB 4GB memory stick for under £30. I can now increase my laptop or desktop memory to 6GB when required. How cool is that. :dance2:

P.S just remember to reformat the memory stick to NTFS or it will not work.

Paul

[visagephoto]

For those of you using Vista, you might be interested to know that Tesco's are selling a Ready Boost ready USB 4GB memory stick for under £30. I can now increase my laptop or desktop memory to 6GB when required. How cool is that. :dance2:

P.S just remember to reformat the memory stick to NTFS or it will not work.

Paul

Costco are doing a similar deal (for a few days only) with 20% off a Sandisk 4GB Cruzer Micro USB flash drive, which is also windows ready boost compatible. Discount price is only £16.45.

Alan

[BarryM]

For those of you using Vista, you might be interested to know that Tesco's are selling a Ready Boost ready USB 4GB memory stick for under £30. I can now increase my laptop or desktop memory to 6GB when required. How cool is that. :dance2:

P.S just remember to reformat the memory stick to NTFS or it will not work.

Paul


so it utilises it as a kinda ram ???

[visagephoto]

I'm not really sure Barry, but I think it uses it as a temporary swap disk instead of constantly writing to and reading from the slower hard drive.

Alan

[Wadey]

Ready Boost allows Vista to make random disc reads from a flash drive, that are significantly quicker than random disc reads from a hard drive.
If large chunks of sequential data need to be read, Vista will still use the hard drive, as flash drives are slow at performing sequential reads.

What Windows is basically doing is creating a cache on the flash drive (the original paging file is still stored on the hard drive by the way, and all the data created on the flash drive is duplicated on the HDD as well) that enables the system to access certain data quickly if needed.

Significant gains (especially with Photoshop) can be achieved using ready boost, but ONLY under certain circumstances.

If your machine is pretty powerful, and has loads of RAM, you are unlikely to see any significant speed gains for the most part. However, if you push the system hard by loading plenty of data into RAM, and perhaps have several applications open at the same time, then you may well speed things up by using a Ready Boost device.