How To Speed Up Your Computer With A USB Drive
I’m sure you’ll have a bunch of external memory devices lying around your desk that‘s totally wasted. One of such device is the USB thumb drives and they’re perfect for Windows to cache a portion memory as your PC gets to data in RAM a lot faster than fetching from the hard drives.
Using ReadyBoost, a component of Microsoft Windows since Windows Vista and comes bundled with Windows 7, you can literary transform the USB drive as an additional cache storage which has a similar effect as installing physical RAM module on your computer.
This method is ideal for PC users who find installing RAM (memory) is either too technical or expensive to buy. Using ReadyBoost is probably the way to go as it’s cheaper to buy a USB thumb drive and effective option to speed up your computer.
Here’s how you can take advantage of this speed boosting feature bundled with your Windows 7 or Vista operating system.
1. Insert the USB drive into your computer’s USB available port.
2. The “Autoplay” dialogue box opens immediately.
3. In the USB device properties dialog box, click “Speed Up my system”
That’s all you have to do and your computer will now use the USB drive as an addition to it’s in-built RAM and you’ll soon notice an improvement in speed.
However there’s some requirement for ReadyBoost to work.
- First of all, your USB thumb drive must be USB2.0 or greater
- It must have at least 256 megabytes to 4 gigabytes of free space
- Check if the USB drive comes with a Windows ReadyBoost logo. Otherwise look for one that is capable of 2.5MB/sec for 4KB random reads and 1.75MB/sec for 512KB random writes.
(if you’re a techie and you really want more technical details, check out what Matt Ayers, the program manager of ReadyBoost and he has put together a complete ReadyBoost FAQ for all who wants to know more.
Other Things You Need To Know About ReadyBoost
- Windows will decide how much drive’s capacity from your USB Drive will be dedicated to ReadyBoost. If you want to re-configure the amount of memory used for cache storage, then go to right click on Windows 7 Logo (left bottom) -> Open Windows Explorer ->right click the USB drive icon. Next select Properties from the menu list, then click the ReadyBoost tab and you can start the configuring.
- For best speed boost result, give 1GB of flash drive to every 1GB of RAM. So if you have 4 GB of physical RAM on your computer, then you should provide 4GB of flash drive.
Tip: Before you go and buy a USB drive, first check with Amazon and read their consumer review section for the specific product. Usually this gives you an indication on how the product fair compare to another product of similar kind. Also if you look around, you might be able to find some nice bargain at Amazon..
