Is ReadyBoost worth the Bother?

When Microsoft launched Vista, it struggled to come up with many real reasons why you should upgrade form Windows XP. Something that's immediately obvious is that due to the extreme overheads of the Windows Aero interface, along with the Windows sidebar, on the same hardware. Windows XP will outperform Vista every time.

This is, of course, particularly bad news for gamers, but ends up affecting all users. One of the new features of Vista that's supposed to help performance is ReadyBoost, and it works with the aid of USB memory sticks.

The idea is that because hard drive access times are sloth-like compared to RAM, you can use a fast USB stick as a form of extra cache, and it's used as an extension to your virtual memory (swap file). Instead of fetching files out of the swap file on the hard disk, Vista retrieves them from the USB stick, because of this, you need a nice large stick, although it can't be any larger than 4GB, while it should also have the fastest access times you can buy.

During our tests with a USB stick plugged in, we were surprised to see it being used for some benchmarks, but not others, as indicated by the light on the stick flashing.

In addition, we also found that where there was any change in the benchmarks, the performance was actually worse, not better. To be honest, the difference was absolutely marginal, but if you have a modern drive, with 16MB of cache, it's going to be faster than a USB stick.

In a previous test, we found that Readyboost was only really effective on Vista systems that had 1GB or less of RAM, which no gamer in their right mind is going to run, so we advise you not to bother.