Windows ReadyBoost was a much discussed new feature introduced by Microsoft for Windows Vista. The idea is simple enough; use USB thumb drives as additional system memory to boost overall performance, sort of. Sort of because adding a 1GB flash drive isn’t exactly like adding an additional 1GB of RAM – actually it’s a fair bit away from that idea. Instead, memory sticks act as another layer of memory cache – it’s more in line with the pagefile and virtual memory than physical RAM. The idea is solid enough but in practice, the results aren’t overwhelming significant. The effects are most noticeable on very memory intensive applications such as video editing or encoding. Even then, the results are more subjective and difficult to quantify. The system feels more responsive.

Given that thumb drives are basically free nowadays it might be worth your while to determine if ReadyBoost has any impact in your usage patterns. Unfortunately, Microsoft has no built in monitoring capabilities as to when or if ReadyBoost is being utilized. However, the developers when left to their own devices rarely fail to deliver. ReadyBoost Monitor is a free Windows application written in .NET for Vista that visualizes the impact of ReadyBoost. Specifically, ReadyBoost Monitor graphs the read/write speed, read/write data, and cached data over time.

Additionally, the application can also be minimized to the tray where the information is displayed via a pop-up balloon on mouse over.