Can someone explain to me Vista ReadyBoost in plain English?

Can someone explain to me Vista ReadyBoost in plain English?

What does it do?

Will it improve gaming?

Thanks

 

RAM = Random Access Memory, a very important feature in gaming and computer performance in general

RAM is where your computer places data that pertains to what it is currently doing, and RAM is designed to allow the computer to quickly place the data in it, and quickly retrieve it as well.

ReadyBoost is a Vista feature that allows the computer to treat a USB drive as RAM. Of course, real RAM works better, but ReadyBoost emulates it as best it can.

Will it improve gaming? Depends on a few things: The game, newer games generally require more RAM. Also depends on how much real RAM you have. If you have 3GB or more, you probably won't notice any difference in performance from using ReadyBoost. If you have less than 3GB, ReadyBoost might help you a lot.

It should be noted that USB sticks have to meet certain requirements for Vista to use them with ReadyBoost. Also, I don't think you can use the USB stick for storage, etc, while it's being used for ReadyBoost.

 

RAM good, harddrive bad. RAM faster than harddrive, even slow flash ram. Computer store needed stuff in RAM make programs go faster. Readyboost good.

Unfortunately, most of the time, it doesn't seem to make a difference in a modern machine with lots of ram, though it can be useful in older machines with minimal ram

 

Lmfao! XD lovin the description of ready boost haha +1 rep

 

ReadyBoost sounds suspiciously like a retread o' good ol' ramdrive where system RAM would emulate a disk drive. Now they take a flash ram drive and emulate system RAM. Earth to Redmond. Come in. RAM is cheap now. Quit serving up rubber chicken TV dinners and Vista Tacos........

 

Someone somewhere in here once found a performance comparison - with and without readyboost.

I think it only really worked for systems with 512MB up to may 1-2GB - any more and it doesn't help any more.

Also: Readyboost will only help if your laptop needs more RAM than it has - i.e. if its non-Cache RAM usage exceeds your RAM.

Cache (for RAM) - prefetched data held in store when you need it - Vista will fill empty RAM with this

So, if you have say 1GB you may see an improvement, for a 2GB system I doubt it.

Most computers will use roughly 1GB of RAM on Vista doing nothing - give or take a little, I think my mother's medion uses about 900MB my SZ uses 1,2GB
Now, most games will use a few hundred MB but I don't think you'll need 800MB for a game (I may be proven wrong on this though)

Then there is your graphics card. Benchmarks may be similar for the Intel X3100 and NVidia 8400GS - but you notice a difference on Age of Empires 3

Then:
Readyboost uses compressed data - so it may even uses your systems power compressing and den decompressing files...

Basically: Wouldn't recomend it for gaming - or any other use as a matter of fact.

 

in essence. crap.
some people say it increases battery life and disk reading performance. but the benefits are so small, no one could tell the diff.

 

As a such the statement is wrong.

Someone once found a comparison.
If you have only 512MB of RAM the difference is significant.

1GB or 2GB systems can see an improvement depending on what is running.

Its only systems 3GB or 4GB of RAM that have absolutely no use for it.

 

Ok, my take on readyboost after working with it for aaaages

The way it seems to work is like a secondary disc cache. When any information is written to the drive it is passed through the readyboost driver. If the blocks of data are small and randomly spaced on the disc they are fed to the HDD as normal but a copy is also compressed and placed onto the readyboost drive. If the blocks are contiguous and large then they are just wirtten directly to the disc and not written to the flash memory. The Readyboost driver can also read small files from the HDD that it has learned will be needed to start frequently used applications.

This has an advantage with virtual memory because it is usually written to in short blocks that are cached onto the memory stick and when later needed can be retrieved very quickly from the flash ram (alot quicker than from the HDD).

One personal example is that I use a readyboost drive on my mail and file server PC here. After 2 weeks of working I had write stats of 8GB written to the flash drive but my read stats were well over 600GB of read data due to the small files that the mail server uses. It has also stopped the HDD thrashing that used to happen when mail was read and written. My server has 4GB of ram so as you can see, although it does not aid in some cases it can have a good effect at reducing wear and noise where a lot of small files are read and written to a HDD.

 

fine. I made the false assumption that everyone has over 2gb of ram. but it's so true that, ram>>>turbo crap.