ReadyBoost - Speed up Windows Vista with USB drive

Your spare USB drive can help make your Vista run faster, with its ReadyBoost feature. The process is quiet simple.

Plug in the USB drive and you will see some option from the AutoPlay menu. Choose "Speed up my system" and the drive is all set to work for Vista and make it faster. Vista uses this memory as an extra cache.

Some prerequisites for the USB device are:

• The USB device must be at least USB 2.0
• The device must be able to do 3.5 MB/s for 4 KB random reads uniformly across the entire device and 2.5 MB/s for 512 KB random writes uniformly across the device.
• The USB has to have at least 64mb of free space

Just in case if your USB drive is not showing the above option then try the following trick:

• Open regedit (start->run->regedit)
• Expand - HKLM (Local Machine)->SOFTWARE->Microsoft->Windows NT->CurrentVersion->EMDgmt
• Find your device.
• Change Device Status to 2
• Change ReadSpeedKBs to 1000
• Change WriteSpeedKBs to 1000
• Plug in the USB device.
• Enable Readyboost.

Do not forget to take a backup of your Registry.