Ready Boost?

[Delirium]

If I enable Ready Boost on my Vista machine (using a flash drive), is my 32 bit machine still limited to 4 gig of total ram, or is ReadyBoost a different animal altogether?

[MrRiplEy[H]]

If I enable Ready Boost on my Vista machine (using a flash drive), is my 32 bit machine still limited to 4 gig of total ram, or is ReadyBoost a different animal altogether?

Readyboost will not help your system in any way unfortunately.

[Fulmar]

Readyboost helps when your system is low on ram in the first place.  All the significant increases in speed (either boot or prefetching) are obtained when the system only has say 512mb of regular RAM installed.  If you already have 4gb of RAM, it's like farting at the sewage treatment plant.  You're not going to notice anything.

As for exceeding 4gb, I can't find the answer with some quick searches.  Your Readyboost memory will not be used for applications, however.

[Denholm]

I think that will only slow down your computer seeing as some memory sticks take a while to read or write any form of data. Well, it will only slow down the parts of the system which have some or all of their data on that stick.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Readyboost doesn't perform miracles i.e. the 4gb limit won't disappear while using it. Just out of curiosity where do you need over 3,5 gigs anyway?

I could never go past 2 gigs even on my windows 7 box while gaming.

[Delirium]

I bought a few flash drives (2 of them for work) and I figured maybe I could take advantage of it.

I guess not. 

[Skuzzy]

Windows (all versions from 2000 and up) restricts 32 and 64 bit applications to 2 GB of virtual RAM for both 32bit and 64bit versions of the operating systems, unless a special flag (IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE) is set when the application is built and another flag is set in the boot.ini (/3GB) file.  See the link for more details.

[eagl]

Contrary to what others here have said, I read a number of reviews that said readyboost can help performance a bit with almost all system configurations.  Flash drives are so cheap, it doesn't hurt a bit to just plug one in and tell vista to use it for readyboost.  You won't actually lose anything by doing so, and might gain a bit depending on your system and what you use it for.

Also, most of the reviewers said that they had to actually USE vista (as opposed to just running benchmarks) in order to see the effect of readyboost, and also that the effect changed over time as they used the system more.  The theory was that vista is actually fairly smart about optimizing performance based on your typical usage so the more you use the system with readyboost, the more it helps until it has maxxed out the search/read/write optimizations for your system and usage patterns.

Or it could all be nonsense and a big conspiracy to sell more flashdrives, but I seriously doubt the conspiracy theory.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Best is not to use Vista at all of course.

Windows 7 has already shown Vista was a huge bag of failure even though it's directly based on Vista. Windows 7 still has a lot of the negative sides of Vista but it also proves 80% of the criticism about original Vista correct. It is just plain bad.