The idea behind ReadyBoost is that you can plug in a USB flash drive and make your computer a little faster. You really shouldn’t obsess on it. After all, any performance gains you realize will quickly be lost if you spend hours analyzing whether it’s working or not.

But if you’re obsessive like me, you can find detailed information about ReadyBoost performance in Event Viewer (which you can find in the Computer Management console), at the following location:

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If you have a slow hard disk, ReadyBoost (see instructions for setting up ReadyBoost) offers a significant performance boost. In my tests, adding a standard USB flash drive to a computer with a WEI disk rating of 3.7 reduced startup time about 30%. Adding ReadyBoost to computers with a WEI disk rating of 5.0 or higher did not improve startup time, but might slightly improve performance after startup. Future “Enhanded for ReadyBoost” flash drives will probably make more of a difference.

Conclusion:  If you have an unused flash drive, plug it in and set it up for ReadyBoost. It won’t hurt. If you have a computer with a WEI disk rating of less than 4.0, adding a ReadyBoost flash drive offers good bang-for-the-buck. If you have a computer with a WEI disk rating of more than 5.0, ReadyBoost still won’t hurt, but it probably won’t give you a noticable improvement.

Read on for the technical details.

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Indera writes (in response to my original ReadyBoost article):

“i found the article very interesting.
what i can’t figure out how many gb the usb hard drive needs to be in order to utilize this feature.
the largest usb drive that i have right now is a 512 mb. is that sufficient or do i need a larger one.

you also mention using an sd card, what size should it be and what speed.
would i have to keep the sd card in the build it sd slot on my laptop
i have a 2gb 150x sd card. if i use this will it make a difference or do i need an sd card with more space.

i understand that this will only improve i/o performance, but that would help me because i open a lot of 3-10 gb word processing documents and sometimes they take longer then i would like waiting for them to open and/or save.

any help would be greatly appreciated.
i also think it would be helpful if this info was added to your web site, as i suspect, that i’m not the only one that wants to know what the minimum drive size is needed to use this feature.

thank you
indera”

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ReadyBoost (a feature new to Windows Vista) uses a USB flash drive or a secure digital (SD) memory card to cache data that would otherwise need to be read from the much slower hard disk. Windows Vista uses SuperFetch technology to automatically determine which data to cache. Instructions after the jump, or read my ReadyBoost performance test results.

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User Account Control (UAC) prompts you before an application makes an important change to your computer that requires administrative privileges. By default, the UAC prompt appears on the “secure desktop”, which freezes and darkens your screen. By freezing your screen, secure desktop makes it more difficult for another application to impersonate Windows and trick you into typing your administrator password into a fake UAC prompt.

The flashing screen is distracting, and slows things down a bit. To turn off the flashing without completely disabling UAC, follow these steps (after the jump):

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Update: For Windows 7, read this article instead.

It seems like every program I install wants to start automatically with Windows. For example, Apple Quicktime puts an icon in the system tray. Adobe Acrobat starts automatically, just so it can more quickly open a PDF file. Each of these startup applications wastes memory and slows down how long it takes Windows Vista to start (though Windows Vista is smart about this, and lets you access the desktop before it starts all these applications).

To configure or disable startup applications in Windows Vista, follow these steps (after the jump):

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When you buy software, there’s always a list of computer requirements on the side. It looks something like this (taken from World of Warcraft):

• 800 MHz or higher CPU.
• 256 MB or more of RAM.
• 32 MB 3D graphics card with hardware Transform and Lighting, such as GeForce 2 or better.
• 4 GB or more of available hard drive space.
• DirectX® 9.0c or above.
• A 56k or higher modem with an Internet connection.

That’s pretty hard to understand if you’re not a computer guy. Windows Experience Index (WEI) gives you a single number, and a set of numbers, that summarize your computer’s capabilities. So, if I want to buy a game for my Dell Latitude D820 with a WEI of 3.1, I just have to make sure that the game’s minimum WEI is 3.1 or lower. Software can also be more specific, and list a Graphics or Gaming Graphics requirement. As you can see from my score, my graphics are the weak link in my computer. (info on interpreting and improving WEI after the jump)

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