USB Storage & Windows Vista ReadyBoost

Many people out there do not know about Window vista’s sweet little program called ready boost. In a nut shell ready boost enables the operating to steal ram from other devices and use them. Items like that USB stick on your key ring. Yes you can now take advantage of the memory on that drive and use it to give Windows Vista that speed boost you have been looking for.

One thing to note is old USB sticks that are slow may not work. Well that’s not really true. It does work you just have to tweak a setting or two to get it going. Here are the steps you can take to take advantage of ready boost on USB drives.

Just plug in your USB device. Close the auto launch down and select the windows vista start button. Now select “Computer”. Now right click on your USB device and select “properties”. Now hit the “Ready Boost” tab on the upper right. Then simply select “Use this Device” and hit OK. You are now done.

If the “Use this Device” is not available or grayed out then follow these instructions to get it to work.

The first thing is to plug the drive in. Just close the auto play down. Now go to the windows vista start button and open up “Computer”. Now right click on the USB device you just plugged in and select “properties”. Now you got to select the “Ready Boost” Tab on top. Check the “DO not retest this device” and press the OK button.

Now you have to remove the device. We will now apply the little Vista tweak I mentioned earlier.

Now hit the windows vista start button again and type in regedit . Now you have to browse down HKLM (Local Machine) -> SOFTWARE -> Microsoft -> Windows NT -> CurrentVersion -> EMDgmt . You should now see a list on the right that shows the many different USB devices you have used. You need to select the one that you just unplugged. Now that you select the device you will now double click on Device Status and change the value to 2 then just hit the ok button. Double click on for ReadSpeedKBs and WriteSpeedKBs, changing their values to both 1000.

It’s a good idea to go ahead and reboot now. Once the computer is back up plug the USB device back in. hit the Vista start button and select “Computer” again and right click on your USB device. Under the readyboost tab you can now select USE This Device.

ref:
http://www.windowvistarepair.com/articles/Enable_Ready_Boost_for_Windows_Vista.html
http://www.techsupportforum.com/microsoft-support/windows-vista-support/251294-vista-readyboost-does-really-work.html