Boost performance with your USB drive

Boost performance with your USB drive

The bigger a computer's RAM, the faster it will be at performing tasks. Yet, adding RAM may not always be feasible.

Boosting your computer's system memory usually requires you to open up the casing and mess with the innards. However, if you are using a Windows Vista computer, you can do it without the hassle - by adding virtual memory instead.

All Vista systems come with ReadyBoost, a feature that lets your computer use flash memory devices - such as USB drives and SD cards - as extra cache memory. This is a form of virtual memory where the computer stores the data it needs to use frequently.

So increasing it will help the computer access data faster and also free the RAM up for other tasks. The overall effect: it boosts your computer's performance but the boost will not be as powerful as if you physically added more RAM.

With Vista computers, there is an easy way to do this. All you need is a USB 2.0 drive with at least 256MB of free space.

Here's how:

1 Plug in the drive. If you have turned on Autoplay, your computer should automatically open up a dialogue box. Under General Options, click on Speed Up My System. This will open the Properties dialogue box.

If you have not turned on Autoplay, go to My Computer to find the USB drive. It should be listed as 'Removable Disk'. Right click on the icon, then select Properties from the pop-up menu.

2 Under the Properties menu, click on the ReadyBoost tab and select 'Use This Device'.

3 Use the slider to choose how much of the USB drive you want to use for boosting memory cache. For optimum performance, Microsoft recommends using one to three times the amount of RAM installed in your computer. So say you have 1GB RAM, you should designate from 1GB to 3GB of the USB drive for ReadyBoost.

4 Lastly, click OK and reboot your computer.

By Tham Yuen-C

Compliment from StraitsTimes, Digital Life