I tried out ReadyBoost under Windows 7 X64 last night, after picking up a spare 16GB 200x USB Key, with some interesting results.
If you’ve never heard of ReadyBoost this WikiPedia article is a useful primer. It’s dead easy to set up and could help speed up your system.
I didn’t notice any immediate improvement to the general running of Win 7 but I expected that since I already have 8GB of RAM. I was rather impressed with booting up though.
Booting from the Bios was about as fast as it normally is to get up to the login screen, it’s after logging in that the magic started, all apps that load and run in the background were instantly available, this alone provides me with a better boot experience and saves me hanging about for things to load.
After a little reading I noticed that in order to make use of the whole 16GB on the stick I need to format it as exFAT, this way Win7 will use the whole stick and hopefully I’ll continue to enjoy a faster startup from here on out.
Of course, this is just a poor man’s answer to not having an SSD to boot from, but it seems to work, so hey! budget boot speed… nice!
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