ReadyBoost is a disk caching technology first included with Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system. It aims to make computers running Windows Vista more responsive by using flash memory on a USB 2.0 drive, SD card, CompactFlash, or other form of flash memory, in order to boost system performance.
ReadyBoost is also used to facilitate SuperFetch, an updated version of Windows XP’s prefetcher which performs analysis of boot-time disk usage patterns and creates a cache which is used in subsequent system boots.
For a device to be compatible and useful it must conform to the following requirements:
* The capacity of the removable media must be at least 256 MB (250 after formatting)
* Devices larger than 4 GB will have only 4 GB used for ReadyBoost
* The device should have an access time of 1ms or less
* The device must be capable of 2.5 MB/s read speeds for 4 KB random reads spread uniformly across the entire device and 1.75 MB/s write speeds for 512 KB random writes spread uniformly across the device
* The device must have at least 235 MB of free space
* NTFS, FAT16 and FAT32 are supported
* The initial release of ReadyBoost supports one device
* The recommended amount of memory to use for Windows ReadyBoost acceleration is one to three times the amount of random access memory (RAM) installed in your computer
Now thats about ReadyBoost. But its supported on Vista not XP. So how to use this feature on XP. I already gave you Virtual Memory Tip here . This Tips is similar to that.
Right Click on My Computer -> Properties -> Performance Options -> Virtual Memory -> Change
Click on Custom and set this to 1.5 times your RAM. Select USB drive to set the pagefile. The drive should be more than 1.5 times the RAM on your PC. This will surely increase system performance to great extent. Especially while using heavy applications and games.