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.

Some tips to make your Vista work faster

1) Disable some useless start up items first: Some of the software like Yahoo Messenger, Windows Sidebar and other applications uselessly load at start up eating away the resources like memory and cpu. To manage this

• Type “msconfig” without double quotes in the run prompt or at the command prompt
• Go to “startup” tab un check the unneeded startup items.

2) Disable the not required services: Repeat point 1 for the services tab instead of startup tab.

3) Add more memory: The simplest way to improve performance is to add more memory (RAM) to your system – 1GB (1024MB) is the minimum recommended amount, but add as much memory as you can afford.

4) Upgrade your drivers: Check for newer drivers specially for your graphics card and chipset.

5) Use USB Flash Drive: If you have a USB flash drive with at least 256MB or more of free space then you can use it to boost your system performance. All you got to do is choose “Speed up my system” when you plug in your flash drive into your system.