Topic: ReadyBoost not quite "ready"

[BillB]

Vista Blues
by Bill Barnes, PCCC

Not Quite “Ready”

I’m starting to see USB flash drives labeled with terminology like: “ReadyBoost for Vista. Increase your Windows memory by plugging in our drive.” With flash drives running around $10 per gig and desktop memory six times as much, I bit and bought one.

The instructions are: plug it in and select the ReadyBoost tab from the Autoplay menu that pops up when you add a new device.

One computer only recognized the flash drive about every third time I plugged it in (it has a history of this with other drives). The one time it did show the ReadyBoost tab, it told me the (ReadyBoost labeled) drive was not good enough to use.

The other computer immediately gave me a ReadyBoost tab and also said I wasn’t good enough. When I clicked “test again,” it relented and decided it could use my drive.

I went back to the first computer to try a “test again,” and it never again showed the tab. Then I returned to the second computer and saw a ReadyBoost folder on the drive, but could not access any configuration settings.

After all that playing, it turns out ReadyBoost won’t be such a great feature for any computers except those that shouldn’t be running Vista, anyway (which includes my first computer). For more technical details, read on.

[BillB]

Technical details

ReadyBoost sounds like it adds to your installed memory just like you opened the case. In fact; it duplicates some of the paging file that is normally on your hard disc in flash RAM. The paging file is where Windows stashes stuff it would really like to keep in memory, but doesn’t have space for. It may be the program code 20 lines down from what’s happening now or the picture that’s not quite yet displayed in your document. On the hard disc it doesn’t have to do all the file management to grab or write this information in the data file.

Move the paging file to flash and the disc head doesn’t have to jump around finding the bits and pieces it needs next. Except flash isn’t necessarily all that fast and a removable drive is not considered reliable. So Windows doesn’t actually close down the paging file on the hard disc in lieu of flash. It actually duplicates part of the file to read faster. But that’s still a certain amount of duplicated effort to manage 2 copies of your cache.

References on ReadyBoost:

Microsoft’s instructions for configuring ReadyBoost:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/features/details/readyboost.mspx.

Microsoft Q&A:
http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02/615199.aspx.

PC World debunks the claims:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,131742-page,1-c,flashmedia/article.html,
http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/17/readyboost-ready-but-doesnt-boost/.