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It works better for older system with less than 512MB ram than the newer ones.

PC Stats has an interesting six page review regarding Microsoft Windows Vista’s ReadyBoost feature. ReadyBoost is supposed to allow the user to plug in a fast USB stick into their system to speed up work the OS needs to do and effectively improve the computer’s performance by storing non-essential information on the drive. The review concludes that this is not the case with current USB keys on the market. Although ReadyBoost does improve overall performance on the system, it is not enough to make a significant difference or to raise some eyebrows. It seems that on older computers with little memory (512MB), ReadyBoost can help out much more than on newer systems - probably the systems Vista would be installed on anyways. Surprisingly enough, however, ReadyBoost did make a slight mark even on video game performance and system startup time.

The theory behind ReadyBoost makes sense; store non essential data on the USB drive for quick access. Sounds good, but in reality ReadyBoost doesn’t increase computer performance significantly. Even with 512MB of system memory, ReadyBoost only increases performance in the benchmarks by a few percentage points.

What the tests don’t show, is that applications within Windows were clearly quicker in loading.

For instance, Microsoft Windows Vista load up times with 512MB of system memory and no ReadyBoost was ~47 seconds. When equipped with a 2GB ReadyBoost USB drive, boot time was cut down by 7 seconds. It was also quite a surprise to see that ReadyBoost boosted framerates of Doom 3 and FEAR when the system was running 512MB of memory.

For memory configurations 1GB or higher, ReadyBoost does not improve system performance, at least not enough for you to notice it.

So there you have it. ReadyBoost can slightly improve performance for users with minimal amounts of system RAM, particularly when it comes to application and boot time.

If you’ve got an older system and find Microsoft Windows Vista a bit slow, ReadyBoost can act as a band aid solution… but I think in the long term you would be much better served by upgrading to at least 1GB of system RAM.

Source: pcstats