[steves6403]

Is ready boost worth setting up?

Ive set up a 4 gig flash drive that was kicking around floor ,,,literally

I really havent seen any performance increase But i do have win7 64 8gig ram phenome2 550 cpu 500 gig hard drive

I only set it up as i read some where that it replaces page file mem instead of using the harddrive

Cheers guys

[nicnik]

makes no difference to me, at best makes some programs load up unnoticably faster. However on my old a64 with 1gb ram on vista it makes a far bigger impact.

[mkk]

Readyboost is not related to the pagefile and with 8GB you might as well turn off the pagefile altogether, unless you've run out of RAM before on that system. On a system that is not directly starved for RAM it takes a very fast flash drive for Readyboost to do any good at all. I also expect Readyboost to do fewer things under Windows 7 since it's working in conjunction with Superfetch, and Superfetch does very little work there compared to under Vista.

[Rayder]

It is my understanding that Readyboost is only useful if you have less than 4GB of RAM. 4GB or more and its effects are negligible, if not totally useless.

[OldBuzzard]

MKK has it right. With 8GB RAM, readyboost is pretty much worthless. He's also right about disabling the pagefile as well. You don't need a pagefile with 8GB RAM.

I've used readyboost with 2, 4, and 8GB RAM. With 2GB I saw a significant increase in performance. With 4GB some, but nothing to get excited about, and with 8, nothing noticable at all.

[Zelig]

You shouldn't turn off the pagefile, it's not just there in the case of running out of memory. Paging is a part of the normal memory management of every modern operating system.

One of the few Windows tweak sites with good information:
TweakHound - Tweaking Windows 7, Page 7

[eatingrich]

I've got a dual core CPU with 3GB RAM on Windows 7 - I haven't really noticed the difference with a 4GB Ready Boost memory card permanently in my memory card slot.

I'm doubling it up as a backup card too so I just keep it in there and it doesn't really make a difference to be honest, but I can't say I've noticed any difference.

I do have the pagefile at the recommended 4GB also though...again, no idea if that makes a difference! If you have 8GB RAM would W7 recommend a small pagefile or does it still recommend having a significant pagefile size?

[Tyrsonswood]

Win7 uses the same size page file as you have RAM unless you change it yourself.

[eatingrich]

Cheers for the reply - yeah it was 3GB but Windows 7 recommended it be 4GB, so I set it to that manually.

I don't notice any difference with Ready Boost but as long as it isn't doing any harm, I'll probably leave the SD Card in there for backup purposes too.

I did wonder if a super-fast SD card might make a difference but I think when you get to that point you're probably clutching at straws!

Thanks again

[Judas]

readyboost only has an advantage with 4gb and less (most noticeably with some laptops i've recently upgraded to windows 7 but use DDR1 ram and the manufacturers put limitations on the upgrades for that (only accepting 512mb of ram total)...

At which point, getting a HIGH SPEED Flash drive is recommended ..... as majority of the flash drives i've played with are slow low speed hunks of crap (most people tend to buy these el-cheapos) which will improve things... using a top end flash drive seriously improves the performance of the machine, while it won't be blistering ram like results... it does seem to give the machine a lot more room to flex. Specially when there is only 512mb of ram and the machine it packing a 2.4ghz pentium or athlon cpu....

[OldBuzzard]

Another thing to consider is that using READYBOOST, you will see a larger increase in performance with Vista than you will in Win 7. That's because Vista's Superfetch is much more aggressive than Win 7's. That's really the only gripe I have with 7. I LIKED how aggressive Vista is with Superfetch.

My last system had 8GB RAM, and using Vista, once Superfetch had done it's thing, I would have only about 400MB or so showing as "free". The rest of the RAM was pre-loaded with applications. With Win 7 on the same system, I would see almost 1/2 the RAM as "free". I could definitely tell a difference in haw fast applications would load in Vista vs. 7. It was quite a bit faster in Vista since a good majority of them were already in RAM, whilst 7 would have to go to the HDD to get them.

It's going to be interesting with my new system with 16GB. I have a Vista install on here that I'm going to be using for gaming. I'm curious to see just how much of 16GB that Vista will pre-load

[Judas]

well with 24gb of ram.... and win7... with the tweaked super fetch... it still only fills up about 5 or 6gb of it...

most of it appears to be Mass effect 2 though recently lol (i get essentially NO loading screens at all between going from any deck on the ship)

[Matth]

As everyone else has said, if you're not short of RAM and paging, you won't notice any difference from readyboost.

[eatingrich]

Cheers for all the replies - I just find it bizarre W7 still makes a thing on ReadyBoost when most PCs will come as standard with specs that won't really benefit from ReadyBoost!

Thanks again.

[Judas]

Originally Posted by eatingrich

Cheers for all the replies - I just find it bizarre W7 still makes a thing on ReadyBoost when most PCs will come as standard with specs that won't really benefit from ReadyBoost!

Thanks again.

i actually quite like it.. because i tend to install windows 7 and vista on machines that are as much as 10+ years old and provided with a usb drive and a USB 2.0 compliant PCI card.... you can make those old girls FLY with windows 7 and readyboost....